The Romance Between Greece and the East

希腊与东方的浪漫

• 批准号: AH/G014175/1
• 负责人: Tim Whitmarsh
• 金额: $ 1.56万
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2009 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FG014175%2F1
• 关键词: Romance; Between; Greece; East

In the late Hellenistic and early imperial periods, a new Greek literary genre appeared: the prose fiction. Where did it come from? To ask the question in a more provocative form: did the Greeks invent the novel? Or, alternatively, was it imported from the Near East? This question has been around, in various forms, since the seventeenth century, but has gained new urgency in the 'culture wars' climate (of which Martin Bernal's Black Athena is, for students of ancient Greece, the most visible symbol). Any attempt to decide whether the novel, now seen as the most canonical and 'European' form of literature, came from Greece or the Afro-Asian world, will clearly have political implications.Most approaches fall into one of two camps: either they are still determined by nineteenth-century nationalist models of Hellenism (which tend to present Greek identity as much more coherent, and indeed omnipresent, than it really was), in which case they tend to see novels written in Greek as essentially Greek; or they content themselves with observing (alleged) similarities between Greek texts and those written centuries (sometimes millennia) earlier, in which case as a rule they emphasise Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Persian or Syropalestinian origins. This series of workshops takes a different approach. Rather than tracing the genre back in time, they explore the hypothesis that the Greek novels were written by people engaging with the world around them, in all its variety. The novel was - this is the proposition - originally a culturally hybrid form. Many of the novelists were from places where cultures met: Achilles Tatius, for example, was from Alexandria, the famously multicultural city on Egypt's Mediterranean coast; Heliodorus was a Phoenician from Emesa, whence the famous Semitic cult of Elagabal (imported into Rome under the Severans). It will also deal with a wider range of texts than most scholarship on the ancient novel considers, including e.g. the 'Alexander Romance' - a work of Egyptian origin, which casts Alexander as a Pharaoh - the more 'romantic' parts of the Septuagint (e.g. Daniel, Esther), and the numerous papyrus fragments that keep turning up in Egypt. If we remove the presumption that we know how to define a 'novel', then we end up with a much more interesting and culturally promiscuous picture of the story culture of Hellenistic and Imperial Greece.The workshops do not only explore ancient novels, they also think about how we should conceptualise literary production and cultural interchange in complex, multiethnic societies. At a theoretical level, this involves serious engagement with postcolonial thought. How much can (for example) Homi Bhabha help us with ancient hybridities? But there are also questions of a more tradition nature, to do with the the mechanics of transmission. How did stories travel between cultures? Is there evidence that stories circulated not only as texts (which were expensive, and thus tended to be the preserve of the metropolitan rich), but also orally and in mimes?

在希腊化晚期和帝国早期，出现了一种新的希腊文学类型：散文小说。它是从哪里来的？用一种更具挑衅性的方式来问这个问题：是希腊人发明了小说吗？或者，它是从近东进口的？这个问题自17世纪以来就以各种形式存在，但在“文化战争”的气氛中（对于古希腊的学生来说，马丁·伯纳尔的《黑雅典娜》是其中最明显的象征），这个问题又变得更加紧迫。现在被视为最经典和最“欧洲”文学形式的小说，任何试图确定它是来自希腊还是亚非世界的尝试，显然都有政治含义。大多数方法分为两个阵营之一：要么他们仍然是由19世纪希腊化的民族主义模式决定的，（这倾向于把希腊身份表现得比实际上更加连贯，甚至无所不在），在这种情况下，他们倾向于把用希腊语写的小说看作本质上是希腊语;或者他们满足于观察（所谓的）希腊文本与几个世纪（有时是几千年）前的书面文本之间的相似之处，在这种情况下，他们通常强调埃及，美索不达米亚，波斯或叙利亚巴勒斯坦的起源。这一系列研讨会采取了不同的方法。他们没有追溯这一体裁的历史，而是探索了一个假设，即希腊小说是由与周围世界接触的人写的，各种各样。小说最初是一种文化混合的形式。许多小说家都来自不同文化交汇的地方：例如，阿基里斯·塔提乌斯来自埃及地中海沿岸著名的多元文化城市亚历山大;赫利奥多罗斯是来自埃梅萨的腓尼基人，著名的闪米特人对埃拉加巴尔的崇拜（在塞维鲁人统治下传入罗马）就是从那里来的。它还将涉及比大多数研究古代小说的学者所认为的更广泛的文本，包括例如“亚历山大传奇”--一部起源于埃及的作品，其中将亚历山大塑造成法老--七十士译本中更“浪漫”的部分（例如丹尼尔，以斯帖），以及在埃及不断出现的大量纸莎草碎片。如果我们不去假设我们知道如何定义一部“小说”，那么我们最终会看到一幅更有趣、更混杂的希腊化和帝国希腊故事文化的图景。工作坊不仅探讨古代小说，还思考我们应该如何在复杂的多民族社会中概念化文学创作和文化交流。在理论层面上，这涉及到对后殖民思想的认真参与。（例如）霍米巴巴能在多大程度上帮助我们研究古代杂交？但也有一些更传统的问题，与传输机制有关。故事是如何在不同文化间传播的？有没有证据表明，故事不仅以文本的形式流传（文本价格昂贵，因此往往是大都市富人的专利），而且还以口头和哑剧的形式流传？