Conferences
Music in Non-Musical Texts in Classical Athen
September 14, 2009
With the support of the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund
While archaic Greece is often referred to as a "song culture," the death of lyric and the rise of prose writing have long been seen as major cultural developments of the classical age. Challenging this cliche, recent scholarship has re-evaluated the importance of musical performances (dramatic and lyric) in the late fifth and the fourth century B.C., but little attention has so far been paid to the interaction between musical culture and non-musical forms — in other words, to the persistent resonances of musical performance in classical Athens.
This conference will discuss the different levels of interaction between musical discourse and non-musical (especially prose) texts and will explore the following questions: In what way do philosophy or oratory discuss, confront or manipulate music and performance for their own purposes? To what extent do rhetorical, philosphical and historical writings incorporate the vocabulary, imagery and aesthetics of musical peformance? Is there something like an intentional silence about the musical world in prose authors? What are the strategies used by non-lyric genres to position themselves vis-a-vis contemporary musical culture?
Invited speakers and respondents include: A. Barker (Birmingham); V. Bers (Yale); D. Cohen (Columbia); D. Creese (Univ. of British Columbia); A. Ford (Princeton); M. Fox (Rutgers); M. Fulch (Univ. of Virginia); T. Power (Rutgers); E. Rocconi (Univ. di Pavia); N. Worman (Barnard).
Download conference program and poster.
Learning Me Your Language
March 20-21, 2009
Teaching Latin and Greek as Second Languages from Antiquity to the Present Day, A conference at Yale University.The graduate students of the Yale University departments of Classics and History are pleased to announce an upcoming conference on the teaching of Latin and Greek from antiquity to the present day, to be held at Yale on Friday and Saturday, March 20-21, 2009.
Entitled Learning Me Your Language — a phrase borrowed from Caliban's rant against Prospero's teaching in The Tempest — this conference will encompass both cultural and linguistic issues surrounding the acquisition of Greek and Latin as second languages. Topics include: the cultural pressures to which education in classical languages responded, the types of educational institutions at which Greek and Latin were taught, the goals of school curricula, the experience of pupils and students, pedagogical methods, the impact of learning the classical languages on use of the first language, and bilingualism in Latin or Greek and another language.
The keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Françoise Waquet, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and author of the seminal book Le latin ou l'empire d'un signe (1998; English transl., 2001). Other speakers — all faculty — come from the United Kingdom, Canada and the US, and hail from a variety of disciplines such as Classics, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, History, and Modern Languages. Please register by e-mailing william.brockliss@yale.edu. The first registrants will be able to attend a presentation of relevant papyri concurrent with the Friday evening reception. For more information and a complete program, visit http://www.yale.edu/classics/news.html
This conference is made possible by the support of the Yale Departments of Classics, the Deputy Provost for the Arts, the Woodward Fund, the Edward J. & Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, the Graduate School, the Beinecke Library, the Hellenic Studies Program, the Renaissance Studies Program, and the Departments of English, French, Italian and History.
Conference organizers
Elizabeth Archibald; William Brockliss; Jonathan Gnoza; Felix Racine.
Greek, Latin, and Indo-European Poetry
A Conference at Yale University, April 24 and 25, 2009
