Society for Classical Studies 156th Annual Meeting
JANUARY 2-5, 2025
PHILADELPHIA
Call for Papers for an Organizer-Refereed Panel
Epic Interjections
Organized by Diana Librandi, Department of Classics, CSULB
For the ancients as for us, interjections elude categories. As elements “thrown into” a sentence and interruptions of the speaker’s line of thought, interjections range from neutral parenthetical utterances to emotionally loaded exclamations. In both ancient and modern theories, they are either considered parts of speech or put outside of the category of speech acts and considered as sounds that both humans and animals use to express emotions. Since they range from independent sentences with specific referential values to sounds without referents, interjections are challenging to examine with respect to their meaning. The semantics of interjections, in addition, are strictly related to their pragmatics, which considers the context of speech utterances, the language of speakers, and the audience’s response. With their power to signify without telling, to say everything and nothing at all at once, interjections can turn that which cannot be fully expressed into some thing palpable and conspicuous. In ways that evoke Anahid Nersessian’s theorization of apostrophe in The Calamity Form, interjections are at the same time descriptively austere and sentimentally abundant.
This panel invites submissions that explore the use of interjections in epic, a genre that has received less attention than ancient drama and ancient grammatical and rhetorical theory. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- the core semantics or the elusive semantics of specific interjections
- the descriptive austerity and sentimental abundance of interjections
- the connection between interjections and the ethos of epic characters
- the connection between interjections and pathos (of characters, of authors, of readers)
- the dispersal of perspectives between authors and readers produced by interjections
- interjections as markers of intertextuality between epic poems
- interjections as markers of a particular author’s epic style
- the narrative contexts and types of speech in which interjections most frequently occur
Please send abstracts for a 15-20 minute paper by February 16, 2024 at info@classicalstudies.org with the subject heading “abstract_epicinterjectionsSCS2025.” Abstracts should be 500 words or fewer (excluding bibliography) and should follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts). The abstracts will be judged anonymously and so should not reveal the author’s name, but the email should provide name, abstract title, and affiliation. Decisions will be communicated to the abstracts’ authors by the end of March, with enough time that those whose abstracts are not chosen can participate in the individual abstract submission process for the upcoming SCS meeting.