Plautus Doctus: Plautine Comedy and its Intellectual Context - 20-21/06/2016, Athens (Greece)
Over the last few years, there has been an intense revival of scholarly interest in Roman Comedy, with recent publications of companions and handbooks (e.g. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, 2014; The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy, forthcoming), volumes dedicated to Roman drama (e.g. Women in Roman Republican Drama, 2015; Roman Drama and its Contexts, 2016) as well as collective volumes on Terence (e.g. the first Companion to Terence, 2013). In the last decade, scholarship on Roman comedy expanded its focus, beyond performance criticism, upon the study of these comic plays as products of a sophisticated treatment of literary tradition, addressing (even) an erudite audience (e.g. Reading Roman Comedy, 2009; Funny Words in PlautineComedy, 2010). In this context, after an outburst in Plautine studies, mainly in the 90’s, and the analysis of Plautus’ comedy mostly with emphasis on its performative aspects and theatrical self-references, a re-examination of the first extant works of Latin literature seems to be on hand (e.g. Plautine Trends, 2014; A Companion to Plautus, forthcoming). Yet, while there have been several previous studies on the way Plautus alludes to political, social and scientific matters, a study exclusively dedicated upon the playwright’s references to various intellectual issues and debates, in connection with his debt to Hellenistic poetics, has not yet emerged.
This workshop aims to re-examine Plautus’ work as the first extant witness of Rome’s early republican milieu and explore various cases through which Plautine comedy offers an invaluable understanding of contemporary intellectual and cultural issues and debates. Papers by specialists in the field (30 minutes long, followed by 20-minute discussion) will address various themes, such as: literary influences upon Plautine comedy; concepts on Roman identity; Greekness and Roman audience’s reactions; Plautus’ dialogue with literary genres; religious, social and popular beliefs reflected in Plautine comedy.
FECHA/DATE/DATA: 20-21/06/2016
LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: Swedish Institute at Athens (Athens, Greece)
ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Chrysanthi Demetriou; Sophia Papaioannou
INFO: web - demetriou.chrysanthi@ucy.ac.cy - spapaioan@phil.uoa.gr
INSCRIPCIÓN/REGISTRATION/REGISTRAZIONE: gratis / free / gratuito
PROGRAMA/PROGRAM/PROGRAMMA:
Monday, 20th June
9.00 – 9.30 Registration
9.30-9.45 Welcome
Session I: Greeks and Romans
9.45-10.35 Gesine Manuwald (UCL), Plautus and Greekness
10.35-11.25 Katerina Philippides (Patras), Anti-Catonism and Catonism in Plautus
11.25-11.50 Break
Session II: Generic Interactions
11.50-12.40 Ariana Traill (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Plautus and the Origins of Roman Satire
12.40-13.30 Evangelos Karakasis (Ioannina) Statius’ Achilleid as a comic drama: Generating meaning through comic intertextuality
13.30-15.00 Lunch
Session III: Influence and Innovation
15.00-15.50 Ioannis Konstantakos (Athens), Munchausen in Rome: Plautine Braggarts and Hellenistic Storytelling
15.50-16.40 Emilia Barbiero (New York), Treading the Path Untrodden: The Aesthetics of Novelty in Plautus’ Pseudolus and Casina
16.40-17.30 Sophia Papaioannou (Athens), Designing Plots, Performing Identities: Plautus’ anxiety of influence
Tuesday, 21th June
Session IV: Society
9.30-10.20 Ruth Caston (Michigan) “More than friends”: amicitia in Plautine comedy and philosophy
10.20-11.10 Seth Jeppesen (Brigham Young), Meaningful Mispronunciations: Religious Parody in Plautus’ Cistellaria 512-27
11.10-12.00 Chrysanthi Demetriou (Cyprus), Identical Twins and Duplicates in Plautus: A Study of a Dramatic Motif in Context
12.00-13.00 Roundtable Discussion