Organizer: Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, University of Texas at Austin
Recent years have seen an explosion of fragmentary corpora newly edited and published (Hollis’ 2007 Fragments of Roman Poetry c. 60 BC-AD 20; Schauer’s 2012 Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta, Vol. 1; Cornell’s Fragments of the Roman Historians and Brill’s New Jacoby, both in 2014). At the same time, a growing body of work has posed more systematic questions about fragmentary material and the impact it has had on modern and ancient reading practices. The time is ripe, therefore, to reflect on and re-evaluate the collective role of fragments and fragmentary survival within the field. This panel aims to take advantage of the recent heightened interest in fragmentary material, as well as the increased access to it provided by the new editions, to take stock of old approaches to fragmentary survival and outline new avenues for research. In so doing, the panel aims also to raise awareness of the new corpora not only as models for philological work in themselves, but also as catalysts for new views on canonical literature. The panel thus embraces work on fragmentary corpora from a broad disciplinary range, including both Greek and Latin literature in any genre and its reception, and extending as well to visual and material evidence.
The panel invites papers exploring the full range of approaches to fragments, their collection and interpretation. In addition to work on specific fragmentary material, the organizer especially welcomes papers engaging with the following questions:
- What new approaches can we employ in studying fragmentary authors, and how might those fragments be used in tandem with the study of more canonical authors?
- We have traditionally grouped fragments by genre and language (the Greek historians, the Roman tragedians, etc.). What new theoretical approaches are well suited to the classification or interpretation of fragments? Alternatively, how do other categories, such as date, authorship, etc., determine our exposure to certain fragments?
- David Levene has argued for the Bellum Jugurthinum as a ‘deliberate fragment.’ What concepts did the ancients have of a fragment, and what literary paradigms did such ideas evoke? Is fragmentation a form of literary play?
- To what extent does the Romantic image of antiquity as ruins and fragments affect the way we today engage with our field, and specifically with those parts of it that are indeed fragmentary?
- Can fragments be popularized? As one of the more difficult bodies of material to work with, are fragments symbolic of the more abstruse aspects of classical scholarship?
Please send anonymous abstracts (of no more than one page in length) for a 20-minute paper as PDF attachments to the SCS office at scsmeetings@sas.upenn.edu by March 2, 2015. Please mention the title of the panel in your email. Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously.