Poster Session

The patterns of metatheatrical language across all surviving authors and genres of Greek and Roman comedy reveal ancient comedy’s subversive core. First, characters of the lowest status are most often responsible for metatheatrical language.

National and regional standards for learning classical languages are closing the gap between modern and ancient language-learning theories. In Standards for Learning Classical Languages (Glascoyne et alii, 1997), “communication, culture, connections, comparisons, and communities” are in the forefront, and the abilities of speaking, writing, and listening together with reading are seen as conducive to effective language learning (Grueber-Miller, 2006; Abbot et alii, 1998). These five Cs seem to point to domains of “language use” and to a more “communicative” classroom environment.

Sayings of various kinds attributed to Greek philosophers and other ancient celebrities circulated in oral and written form at least from classical times until late antiquity. These ancient Greek sayings were transmitted to the Middle Ages where they were recollected and reused in Greek, and translated, transformed and often transmogrified into Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Spanish, French, English and so on. This presentation summarizes my attempts to use digital tools to edit a corpus of clearly related, medieval collections of Greek sayings.

This presentation will offer practical advice for authoring an e-textbook and implementing it successfully in your courses. We will weigh the relative advantages of the e-textbook versus other methods of content delivery, and we will consider which types of courses and material would most benefit from the teacher-authored e-textbook. I will take the audience through the entire authoring process, from choosing a platform to distribution and implementation in the classroom.

Many present-day commentators will say that there is not such a thing as the ‘one single best interpretation’ of a word, line or poem. They often use concepts such as ‘ambiguity’ and ‘polysemy’. One of the arguments used against this tendency is that it is anachronistic and stems from a lack of philological competence. Nisbet mentions the “problem with dead languages that none of us knows them quite well enough to exclude all misunderstandings; an inexperienced student faced with a difficult unseen may be excused for finding it quite exceptionally polysemous.” (Nisbet 1995, 429).