The Transformations of Autocracy in Postclassical and Early Christian Literature

该项目侧重于希腊和罗马帝国文学的“空间语用学”。“空间语用学”一词是指认知机制和文化实践的结合，它使一个社会能够投射出连贯的自我形象，并根据理想化的模板在政治空间中定位自己。文学被视为赋予地理学以目的性结构的文化实践之一。这个项目的目标是组成三部曲的第三部分，研究地中海政治地理的转变与希腊和罗马文学史之间的联系。第一部分将于2022年由牛津大学出版社出版，研究从荷马到泰奥克里托斯的希腊文学的发展与希腊从古代到希腊化时期的政治地理变化之间的联系。目前正在进行的第二部分，将类似的方法应用于从卡图卢斯到奥维德的罗马诗歌历史。第三部分将把这种方法扩展到后奥古斯都时期罗马的希腊和罗马文学的发展。它将追溯罗马作为一个专制的普遍帝国的当代形象对古典文学传统的后古典继承者和基督教的出现的影响——基督教不仅是帝国意识形态的重要选择，也是对古典经典的重要选择。由此产生的三部曲不仅将为从荷马到奥古斯丁的古代文学作为空间语用学的工具/产品的观点提供一个合理的案例，而且还将空间语用学作为适用于其他文化研究领域的工具。

This project focuses on the ‘spatial pragmatics’ of the Greek and Roman imperial literature. The term ‘spatial pragmatics’ is used in the sense of a combination of cognitive mechanisms and cultural practices that enable a society to project a coherent self-image and to orient itself in the political space in accordance with that idealized template. Literature is treated as one of such cultural practices that serve to endow geography with purposeful structure. The goal of this project is to compose the third part of a trilogy that investigates the links between the transformations of the political geography of the Mediterranean and the history of Greek and Roman literature. Part I, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2022, investigates the links between the development of Greek literature from Homer to Theocritus and the shifts in the political geography of Greece from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. Part II, currently in progress, applies a similar approach to the history of Roman poetry from Catullus to Ovid. The proposed third part will extend this approach to the development of Greek and Roman literature in post-Augustan Rome. It will trace the impact of contemporary images of Rome as an autocratic universal empire both on the post-classical heirs of the classical literary tradition and on the emergence of Christianity – a critical alternative not only to imperial ideology but also to the classical canon. The resulting trilogy will make a plausible case not only for the view of ancient literature from Homer to Augustin as an instrument/product of spatial pragmatics but also for the use of spatial pragmatics as a toolkit applicable in other areas of cultural studies.