Organizers: Yelena Baraz (Princeton) & Petra Schierl (Basel)
Bucolic poetry opens up a seemingly timeless space: herdsmen bearing well-known names like Tityrus, Mopsus, or Lycidas tend their animals while singing or conversing about song. The recurrence of themes and motifs is a feature that ties the bucolic poet closely to his predecessors. A sense of continuity is thus written into the genre. But appearances are deceptive: “Difference amidst the suspicion of sameness is the hallmark of Virgil’s engagement with Theocritus.” What Richard Hunter (2006, 116) observes for Vergil applies to his Latin successors as well: Calpurnius Siculus, the Einsiedeln Eclogues, Nemesianus, and Christian writers experimenting with the genre. While closely reworking their models and imitating their literary techniques bucolic poets stake out their ground. The apparent straitjacket of generic conventions, above all the obligatory use of a fictive world of herdsmen-singers, enables and, arguably, requires the expansion of generic boundaries and provides a frame within which contemporary issues, whether political or poetic, may be addressed.
This panel seeks to explore how Vergil's bucolic successors transform the genre while conforming to the tradition. It aims to encourage a reassessment of this body of understudied texts from different periods of antiquity and to show how they can contribute productively to a number of ongoing conversations in contemporary classical scholarship.
We invite contributions discussing the following questions:
• How do the poets position themselves within the tradition? How do they balance their relationship to individual predecessors, above all Vergil, with a view of the tradition as a whole?
• How and why is the allegiance to the genre made manifest, while generic boundaries are expanded or violated? Which features do the poets see as essential to the genre and which as sites for innovation? What genres become coopted as sources for new generic energy?
• How does the genre provide a matrix for the articulation of contemporary political, religious, or poetic concerns?
• What insight into reading practices do we gain? Can these insights influence how we read the earlier texts in light of the later?
• How is the imaginative power of the natural world harnessed in these texts?
To facilitate discussion final presentations must be submitted to the organizers by November 15th, 2015. Copies will be distributed to the organizers and panel members. Please send anonymous abstracts (PDF attachment) by March 2nd, 2015, to scsmeetings@sas.upenn.edu. List AV requests and contact information in the body of the email. Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously.