Richard Martin | Self-fragmenting Artifacts

Current Humanities Center fellow Professor Richard Martin (Classics) will present a paper titled “Self-fragmenting Artifacts.” John Tennant (Classics) will deliver a response. Professor Martin summarizes the paper as follows:
 
“Four streams of critical practice converge in this attempt to read the fragments of ancient Greek comedy (circa 450-150 BC) in a new way: first, the perennial attention to the “fragment” as a literary form with equal appeal for Romantics and Modernists; second, more recent studies on quotation culture (Garber’s Quotation Marks,  Regier’s Quotology, Finnegan’s Why Do We Quote? and Morson’s The Words of Others), which build on earlier work about commonplace books; third, insights from ethnopoetics and the ethnography of speaking concerning micro-genres like proverbs; and fourth, cognitive poetics.
 
By comparing fragments with one another as also with full surviving plays, I open up larger questions about the speech-genres that attracted excerptors and transmitters of comic fragments, whether in Athenaeus or the scores of other sources for our texts. In so doing, I think about the nature of florilegia and develop a notion of “pre-quotation”—that is, a conscious shaping of language on the part of speakers that aims from the start at being excerpted, repeated and merged into broader common discourse. This is speech in the act of seeking its own memorialization—and it (mostly) worked.”

About the Speaker

Image

Richard P. Martin is Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor in Classics at Stanford. He writes on archaic Greek poetry, culture, and myth, with a special focus on Homeric epic. His further interests include Greek religion, comedy, ethnopoetics, medieval Irish literature, and Modern Greek verbal art.

Learn more