Celtic
Conference in Classics, Cork, July 9-12 2008
KYKNOS Panel: ‘Authority and Authenticity in Ancient Narrative’
- CALL FOR PAPERS -
Narratives involve an exchange between narrator and narratee, and the context and nature of this exchange can be crucial for reading the narrative. The give-and-take of telling a story, giving an account, and so on, involves a power-play between the parties concerned, sometimes overt, and sometimes subtle. Persuasion, whether to listen to/read a narrative at all or to believe that its contents are true or interesting, is an essential part of this dynamic, as is a willingness to listen, read, believe, or suspend disbelief.
This panel aims to explore the devices and mechanisms by which those involved in narrative seek to establish their authority and the authenticity, or otherwise, of what they relate or hear/read. Avenues we envisage being interesting to explore include: How do narrators claim authority and to what extent is it important that the narratee accepts it? How do narrators try to establish the authenticity of what they narrate? What effects can a lack of confidence, scepticism, or disbelief have on those involved in narrative? How do relationships between narrators and narratees within a text compare to those between author and listener/reader? Do questions of ‘authority’ and ‘authenticity’ differ between ‘factual’ narratives, such as historiography, and ‘fictional’ narratives, such as the novel? How do concepts such as inspiration, autopsy, and hearsay interrelate, and how important is the relationship between genre and the means for establishing authority and/or authenticity? What part do false attributions and forgeries have to play? How ‘multi-layered’ can texts be with regard to this topic, and is consistency important?
This list is by no means exhaustive, and we shall be more than happy for contributors to interpret the topic in other ways. We anticipate that the terms ‘narrative’, ‘narrator’, and ‘narratee’ will be taken broadly to include every narratorial level, from authorial to the most embedded ‘text’.
This panel
follows on from its very successful predecessor at the 2006 meeting of the
Celtic Conference in Classics, at Lampeter. The proceedings of this have now
been published as Philosophical Presences in the Ancient Novel. Ancient
Narrative Supplementum 10, and we aim to publish a volume based on this
panel in the same series.
Speakers and topics so far include:
Pavlos Avlamis: ‘Life of Aesop’
Lynn Fotheringham (Nottingham): Cicero
Fritz-Gregor Herrmann (Swansea): ‘Socrates’ story-telling’
John Morgan (Swansea): TBC
Mirjam Plantinga (Lampeter): ‘Hellenistic Poetry’
Ian Repath (Swansea): ‘Courting authority in Achilles Tatius’
Federico Santangelo (Lampeter): ‘Pseudo-Sallust: the invective to Cicero and
the letter to Caesar’
John Morgan
Mirjam Plantinga
Ian Repath