Intertextuality and its Discontents

Christopher S. van den Berg, Amherst College Yelena Baraz, Princeton University Intertextuality and its Discontents Since the 1990’s intertextuality has assumed a central role in the scholarship on ancient literature. The conceptual move away from allusion towards intertextuality has ushered in new approaches to the imitative habit of ancient authors (Barchiesi 1984/2001, Conte 1986, Edmunds 2001, Fowler 2000, Hardie 1990/1993, Hinds 1998, Hunter 2006, Hunter and Fantuzzi 2004, Pucci 1998, Putnam 2006, Quint 1993, Thomas 1986). The fruits of that shift are manifold: appreciation of the pervasive and productive character of imitation, acknowledgement that reference both appropriates and undermines a tradition, and acceptance that alluding authors interpret forerunners and offer metacritical assertions about their own texts. While these advances pervade mainstream criticism, numerous alternatives still demand consideration. Fowler 2000 remarked on the tendency “for intertextual criticism to concentrate on poetic literary texts to the neglect first of prose, subliterary, and non-literary texts, and second of other types of cultural production” (128). His insight still holds. Our treatment tends to involve limitations of both genre and era. For example, analysis of Roman texts has focused on poetry—especially epic—from the Augustan and Flavian periods. Recent exceptions (Marchesi 2008, O’Gorman 2009, Van Mal-Maeder 2007) provide an impetus to move beyond the poetic canon that underlies our theoretical frameworks. In short, intertextuality is ripe for consideration of new texts and new directions. This panel aims to identify hitherto unexplored areas that illuminate the workings of textual redirection. The problem is not solely whether we can impose the ascendant methodology onto a broader array of works—although that enterprise may prove valuable—but whether a more diverse application will alter or challenge current orthodoxy. We seek papers with fresh perspectives on textual relationships, and encourage presentations on traditionally overlooked genres, cultural practices, or terminology—including alternative theoretical models to intertextuality. Papers might explore the following directions: • Textual interplay in prose texts remains grossly undertheorized. How do historiography, dialogue, oratory, epistolography, and technical prose afford us new insights? • How might we account for the consequences of rhetorical education, such as the inculcation of textual and ethical backstories through the cultures of memoria and personae (i.e. stock phrases, topoi, and the assumption of alternate identities)? What do genres relying on these social practices, such as oratory and satire, reveal to us about authorial agency and intention, and do these genres lend themselves to the study of a “textual unconscious” (cf. Oliensis 2009)? • Are intertextual habits language- or culture-specific? For example, is Homer’s legacy in Greek texts or Plato’s citation of poets fundamentally different from Vergil’s Nachleben or Cicero’s reliance on poetry? Does the theme of belatedness in Greek works or the seemingly innate character of intertextuality at Rome prime us to seek out allusions we might otherwise disregard? • How do authors discuss “citational failures” and what are the nature and vocabulary of their discontent (furtum, plagiarism, contaminatio, failed intentionality, etc.)? Have certain texts in particular been left out of the reckoning (e.g. Comedy and Declamation)? • Do material objects, visual media, or ecphrastic discourse obey separate intertextual norms and strategies? Do objects cite texts in the same way that texts cite objects? • How does the “Alexandrian footnote” differ from overt citation common to prose genres (e.g. sources in historiography or doxography in dialogue)? What are the consequences of explicit versus implicit citation? Is the revision of facts or arguments in historiography and dialogue essentially different from the revision of literary scenes via intertextual citation? • Does intertextuality suffice as a critical practice? Can classicists formulate better methods to describe the rewritings and recirculations of ancient cultural production? Bibliography Barchiesi, A. (1984). La Traccia del modello. Pisa. ---(1993). ‘Future Reflexive: two modes of allusion and Ovid’s Heroides’, HSCP 95: 333-65. ---(1997). The poet and the prince:Ovid and Augustan discourse. Berkeley. ---(2001). Speaking volumes: narrative and intertext in Ovid and other Latin poets. Duckworth. Conte, G. B. (1986). The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets. ed. C. Segal. Ithaca. ---(1994). Genres and Readers. tr. G. Most. Baltimore. Edmunds, L. (2001). Intertextuality and the Readings of Roman Poetry. Baltimore. Feeney, D. (1991). The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Fowler, D. (2000). Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin. Oxford. Gaisser, J. (1995). ‘Threads in the Labyrinth: Competing Views and Voices in Catullus 64,’ AJP 116: 579-616. Hardie, P. (1990). ‘Flavian Epicists on Virgil’s Epic Technique,’ in: The Imperial Muse (ed. A.J. Boyle). Bendigo, Australia. 3-20. ---(1993). The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge. Hinds, S. (1998). Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Hunter, R. (2006). The shadow of Callimachus: studies in the reception of Hellenistic poetry at Rome. Cambridge. Hunter, R. and Fantuzzi, M. (2004). Tradition and innovation in Hellenistic poetry. Cambridge. Marchesi, I. (2008). The art of Pliny's letters: a poetics of allusion in the private correspondence. Cambridge. O’Gorman, E. (2009). ‘Intertextuality and Historiography,’ in Feldherr, A. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge. 231-242. Oliensis, E. (2009). Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry. Cambridge. Pucci, J. (1998). The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition. Yale. Putnam, M. (2006). Poetic interplay: Catullus and Horace. Princeton. Quint, D. (1989). ‘Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid,’ MD 23: 9-54. ---(1993). Epic and Empire. Princeton. Sharrock and Morales (eds.) (2000). Intratextuality: Greek and Roman textual relations. Oxford. Thomas, R. F. (1986). ‘Virgil’s Georgics and the art of reference,’ HSCP 90: 171-98. Van Mal-Maeder, D. (2007). La Fiction des déclamations. Brill.