Hyperreality, Intertextuality, and the Study of Latin Poetry

Abstract

, and many others. To Giulia, for her courage and her freshness. Translations are mine unless noted. 1 A good map of issues relating to scientifi c models can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science/ Enrica Sciarrino documented journal article." It does indeed, and I left it so intentionally. I was collecting ideas and texts for this little project when, on the early morning of September 4, 2010, a 7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch, the city in which I live and work. On that occasion, the city suffered serious damage (including the library), but fortunately there were no fatalities. On February 22, 2011, on the same day the library fi nally reopened and the second day of the new academic year, another major earthquake hit the city. This time 185 people died, and it is unclear how many were injured. A week later, we resumed teaching in tents set up on campus and carried on business "as usual" throughout the whole year, without libraries to go to, and offering support as best we could to the students who did not fl ee the city. This article has developed in that environment. Most of the considerations that it contains arose during precious conversations with friends and colleagues, while browsing notes scattered in notebooks and electronic documents, and through Google searches. Accordingly, this is a theoretical refl ection, but it is also an experiment in what it means to pursue humanistic work in crisis situations-and to keep doing so in spite of major disruptions and minimal resources. DISCOURSE AND RELATED MATTERSIn the last decades, the term "discourse" has become increasingly common in a variety of disciplines, so much so that it is invariably left undefi ned as if its meaning were self-explanatory. In the analysis of literary texts, "discourse" invokes the work of a group of French philosophers of the late 60s. Michel Foucault is one of them, and in his Archaeology of Knowledge, he defi nes discourse as follows (1972.80):Instead of gradually reducing the rather fl uctuating meaning of the word "discourse," I believe that I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.In the fi rst defi nition, discourse is an entity made out of sequences of signs organized in the form of enouncements (enoncés) or statements; in the second, discourse is the combination of statements that characterize large bodies of knowledge: something comparable to the disciplines (1916, French ed.), de Saussure distinguished between parole and langue. Parole refers to the realm of individual moments of language use-of particular "utterances" or "messages," whether spoken or written-and langue to the system or code of the language (le code de la langue) or, to put it in de Saussure's words, to "the social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have bee...

Traces of Philology in Mid-Republican Latin Poetry

“…8.On intertextuality, see Barchiesi (1997); Hinds (1998); Edmunds (2001); Sciarrino (2015), esp. 373–5.…”