Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece : Under the Spell of Stories

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies. Focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative, it triangulates ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches, opening up new vistas within the study of classical literature while ably deploying the ancient material to demonstrate the value of a historical perspective for cognitive studies. Concepts such as immersion and embodiment help to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory. The thirteen chapters presented here tackle a broad range of narrative genres, broadly understood: besides epic, historiography, and the novel, tragedy and early Christian texts are also considered alongside non-literary media, such as dance and sculpture. Authored by international specialists in the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece, each chapter utilizes a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools drawn from cognitive studies, phenomenology, and linguistics that place them at the vanguard of a strong new current in classical scholarship and literary criticism more generally. This chapter considers the Ethiopica's piercing reflections on narrative mimesis that can be found in the responses to embedded narrations and other passages. The Ethiopica certainly emphasize the capacity of narrative to enwrap the audience, but at the same time they do not fail to mark the limits to immersion. As parallels in ekphrastic literature and the theory of rhetoric indicate, this play with immersion and reflection bespeaks a broader sensitivity to the complex nature of aesthetic experience in the Imperial Age. Heliodorus also draws our attention to the different perspectives of readers and characters no matter how experiential the narrative is. Embedded audiences highlight the dynamics of narrative economy which privileges readers over characters. Moving from reception to the medium of narrative, one finds implicit reflections on the ontological and epistemological gap between words and the world they represent. The chapter yields the conclusion that Heliodorus artfully entwines immersion and reflection, therefore ironically providing a corrective to the post-structuralist assumptions that have guided some of the most fruitful explorations of the Ethiopica. This chapter addresses the issue of narrative and experience from the perspective of ancient images, and with a focus on sculpture, a medium which does not seem particularly appropriate for pictorial narrative. As a first step, it discusses this evident lack of congruence between pictorial narrative and sculpture, and show ways in which narrative can, nevertheless, function in sculpture. For this purpose, it introduces a general distinction between two kinds of image-related 'presence' with reference to the case of the Knidian Aphrodite. This distinction then serves as a hermeneutical tool in the discussion of the chapter's main categorical focus, namely the incomplete copies of sculptural groups. The analysis of this phenomenon of the Imperial Era focuses on strategies of involving the viewer in the pictorial narrative and thus reinforcing the immersive power of sculpture. Finally, it discusses the intentional creation of voids within the image, as observed in incomplete copies, in the larger context of the visual culture of the Imperial Era, notably through a parallel with the theatrical medium of pantomime. Title Pages 1 Preface 5 List of Illustrations 7 List of Contributors 8 Introduction. Narrative and Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Greece 9 Narrative Immersion. Some Linguistic and Narratological Aspects 21 The Allure of Narrative in Greek Lyric Poetry 42 Pathos with a Point. Reflections on ‘Sensationalist’ Narratives of Violence in Hellenistic Historiography in the Light of Twenty-First-Century Historiography 65 Attending to Tragic Messenger Speeches 88 Experiencing the Church in the Book of Visions of the Shepherd of Hermas 110 World and Words. The Limits to Mimesis and Immersion in Heliodorus’ Ethiopica 131 Ps.-Longinus on Ecstasy. Author, Audience, and Text 152 Rough Reading. Tangible Language in Dionysius’ Criticism of Homer 176 Enargeia and Bodily Mimesis 192 Asyndeton, Immersion, and Hypokrisis in Ancient Greek Rhetoric 214 Dancing the War Report in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes 237 Narrative, Experience, and the Image. Incomplete Copies in Imperial Age Sculpture 254 Lived Aesthetics and the Inner Narrative 285 Works Cited 301 Index of Places 329 General Index 337 Drawing on cognitive approaches to literary studies, this volume pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative that transcends the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies, deploying concepts such as immersion and embodiment in order to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient Greek narrative and ancient reading habits.