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.

0 - Narrative and Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Greece: An Introduction
1 - Narrative Immersion: Some Linguistic and Narratological Aspects
2 - The Allure of Narrative in Greek Lyric Poetry
3 - Attending to Tragic Messenger Speeches
4 - Pathos with a Point: Reflections on 'Sensationalist' Narratives of Violence in Hellenistic Historiography in the Light of 21st-Century Historiography
5 - Experiencing the Church in the Book of Visions of the Shepherd of Hermas
6 - World and Words: The Limits to Mimesis and Immersion in Heliodorus' Ethiopica
7 - Longinus on Ecstasy: Author, Audience, and Text
8 - Rough Reading: Tangible Language in Dionysius' Criticism of Homer
9 - Enargeia and Bodily Mimesis
10 - Asyndeton, Immersion, and Hypokrisis in Ancient Greek Rhetoric
11 - Dancing the War Report in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes
12 - Narrative, Experience, and the Image: Incomplete Copies in Imperial Age Sculpture
13 - Lived Aesthetics and the Inner Narrative

Jonas Grethlein holds the Chair in Greek Literature at Heidelberg University. He has been awarded the Maier-Leibnitz Prize, received an ERC starting grant, and was a Gerda Henkel Fellow at Brown University and a Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. His monographs include Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity: The Significance of Form in Narratives and Pictures (CUP, 2017), Die Odyssee: Homer und die Kunst des Erzählens (C. H. Beck, 2017), Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine (CUP, 2013), and The Greeks and their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE (CUP, 2010). Luuk Huitink is currently employed as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics at Leiden University. He has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC Project 'Ancient Narrative' at Heidelberg University, Leventis Research Fellow in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford, and Spinoza Visiting Fellow at Leiden University. His work focuses on classical Greek prose, and in particular on intersections between linguistics, narratology, and cognition. Aldo Tagliabue is currently an Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Notre Dame. He has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC Project 'Ancient Narrative' at Heidelberg University, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics at the University of Milan, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Lampeter. His work focuses on ancient Greek narratives, and in particular on the Greek novels and the intersections between narrative, the divine, and experience.