This event is supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and the Institute for Classical Studies.
Seminal work in the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s reappraised the significance of the surrounding environment for humans and began situating human nature in space. What was later called the ‘spatial turn’, the intellectual movement sparked by a number of scholars and philosophers, including e.g. Michel Foucault and his work on heterotopia, Lefebvre on the production of space, Michael Bakhtin on the chronotope, de Certeau on space and place, inevitably influenced and has continued to influence the study of literature. Ancient Greek literature is no exception, with important contributions continuing to showcase the significance of a systematic study of space (e.g. Purves 2010, Clay 2011, Thalmann 2011). Nearly four decades after such seminal work began, space and the way the surrounding environment is described and evoked in Greek literature continue to be explored in exciting new ways. Novel approaches take a variety of often opposed directions; whereas some take an earth-centred approach which foregrounds the physical environment in literary works (e.g. ecocriticism) or bring attention away from humans in their exploration of space, to trace non-human agents in the surrounding environment (e.g. new materialisms), others explore space and the spatial experience with an intention to understand better human thoughts, feelings and emotions, thus bringing attention back to humans (e.g. distributed cognitions). All seem to agree that the depiction of space in (Greek) literature has a lot to offer to anyone interested in understanding the ancient world in and beyond literature.
This workshop will bring together scholars working on space, broadly construed, in Greek literature. The aim is to bring the variety of such diverse methodologies and approaches to space in a fruitful dialogue with each other, and to discuss new directions, beyond fixed disciplinary boundaries, that the study of space in Greek literature can take in the future.
See full programme here (opens as PDF)
Please register by May 16th to ensure that your dietary requirements are taken into account.
If you have any questions, please contact Manos Tsakiris at mtsakir2@ed.ac.uk.
Register on Eventbrite.
Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. (1981), ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in M. Holquist and C. Emerson (Des), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, 84-258.
Clay, J.S. (2011), Homer’s Trojan Theater: Space, Vision, and Memory in the Iliad, Cambridge.
De Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven Rendall, Berkeley CA.
Foucault, M. (1984), ‘Des Espaces Autres’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5, 46-49.
Lefebvre, H. (1974), La Production de l’espace, Paris.
Purves, A. (2010), Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, Cambridge.
Thalmann, W.G. (2011), Apollonius Rhodius and the Spaces of Hellenism, Oxford.