IMC 2010: Sessions
Session 405: Décadence: Late Antique Literature and its Reception - A Round Table Discussion
Monday 12 July 2010, 19.30-20.30
| Sponsor: | Platinum Latin |
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| Organiser: | Marco Formisano, Sonderforschungsbereich 'Transformationen der Antike', Humboldt-Universität, Berlin |
| Moderator/Chair: | Danuta Shanzer, Department of Classics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign / Dumbarton Oaks Medieval (Latin) Library |
| Abstract | The aim is to discuss the study of late antique literature and its reception in Western culture. The deliberately provocative title 'Décadence' contains in nuce several problems by problematizing a common periodization. 'Late antiquity', although it has become standard in the last fifty years and although it sounds neutral, in reality offers neither a positive nor an independent definition of this age: it continues to suggest precisely a later phase of antiquity, and late is almost always connoted pejoratively. Décadence, in French, has the merit on the one hand of getting rid of the reference to 'antiquity', on the other of creating a terminological alienation, by putting emphasis on the reception of this epoch over the last centuries, from the paradigm of 'decline and fall' to our post-postmodern perception of late antique culture. Participants include Farouk Grewing (Universität Wien), Ralph Haefner (Universität Tübingen), Michael Roberts (Wesleyan University, Connecticut), Karin Schlapbach (University of Ottawa), and Cristiana Sogno (Fordham University). |