The Transformations of Autocracy in Postclassical and Early Christian Literature

本项目主要研究希腊和罗马帝国文学中的“空间语用学”。“空间语用学”一词被用在认知机制和文化实践的结合意义上，使一个社会能够投射出连贯的自我形象，并根据这种理想化的模板在政治空间中定位自己。文学被视为这样的文化实践之一，它赋予地理以有目的的结构。这个项目的目标是组成一个三部曲的第三部分，调查地中海政治地理的变化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，探讨希腊文学从荷马到西奥克里特的发展与希腊政治地理从古代到希腊化时期的转变之间的联系。目前正在进行的第二部分对从卡图卢斯到奥维德的罗马诗歌史采取了类似的方法。建议的第三部分将把这种方法扩展到后奥古斯都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世帝国的当代形象对古典文学传统的后古典主义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关键选择，也是古典正典的关键选择。由此产生的三部曲不仅为将从荷马到奥古斯丁的古代文学视为空间语用学的工具/产品，而且也为将空间语用学用作适用于其他文化研究领域的工具包提供了一个可信的案例。

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.