Andrea Ercolani - Böcker

The book is the third and concluding part of the investigation on Submerged literature in ancient Greece and beyond.The book expands the inquiry to a comparative perspective, in order to test the validity and usefulness of the hermeneutical approach in other fields and cultures. The comparative case studies deal with gnostic text, Qumran texts, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Cuneiform Texts, Arabic-Islamic literature, ancient Rome, Medieval China, and contemporary southern Italy. The volume tackles themes and questions relating to author and authorship, cultural translation and transmission, the interaction between orality and literacy, myth and folktale. A particular emphasis is given to anthropological themes and methods. In this vein, the book further explores dynamics of emergence and submersion in ancient Greece, including cultural trends promoted respectively by Sparta and Athens.The volume provides the reader with a wide range of tools and methodological suggestions to reconstruct literary phenomena and cultural processes in a given historical epoch and context, as well as offering new insights for both classical and comparative studies.

The volume deals with the mechanisms of the oral communication in the ancient Greek culture. Considering the critical debate about orality, the analysis of the communicative system in a predominantly oral-aural ancient society implies a reassessment and a deep reconsideration of the traces which orality embedded in the texts transmitted to us. In particular, the focus is on the 'cultural message', a set of information which is processed and transmitted vertically as well as horizontally by a living being, so to be differently from a genetically encoded information, a culturally defined process. The survey intertwines different approaches: the methodologies of cognitivism, biology, ethology, to analyze the embrional processes of the cultural messages, and the tools of historical and literary analysis, to highlight the development of the cultural messages in the traditional knowledge, their codification, transmission, and evolutions in the dialectics between orality and writing. The reconstructed pattern of the mechanisms of cultural messages in a prevailing oral-aural system cast a light on a shadowy aspect of a sophisticated communication system that has long influenced European culture.

This is the second volume on the mechanisms of oral communication in ancient Greece, focused on epic poetry, a genre with deep roots in orality. Considering the critical debate about orality and its influence on the composition, diffusion and transmission of the archaic epic poems, the survey provides a reconsideration and a reassessment of the traces of orality in the archaic epic poetry, following their adaptation in the synchronic and diachronic changes of the communicative system. Combining the methods of cognitive science, and the historical and literary analysis of the texts, the research explores the complexity of the literary message of the Greek epic poetry, highlighting its position in a system of oral communication. The consideration of structural and formal aspects, i.e. the traces of orality in the narrative architecture, in the epic diction, in the meter and the formulaic system, as well as the vestiges of the mixture of orality and writing, allows to reconstruct a dynamic frame of communicative modalities which influenced and enriched the archaic epic poetry, providing it with expressive potentialities destined to a longlasting permanence in the history of the genre.

The oral storytelling traditions still alive and practiced in Sicily offer valuable ethnographic data for a better understanding of traditional storytelling methods and practices. They also lend themselves to being investigated in comparison to the Greek epic traditions of Archaic and Classical periods, providing highly useful comparative material for better defining certain issues relevant to historical reconstruction (techniques and methods of execution, horizontal and vertical transmission, improvisation, formularity, variation, etc.).The best-known traditional Sicilian storytelling and playtelling practices (e.g. the 'Cunto', the storytelling acted out by puppets, the 'orbi' singing tradition, etc.) are still relatively unknown and unexplored in studies on orality in the ancient world. Instead, they offer a valuable touchstone for reasoning about narration in the Homeric poems and, more generally, about the practices of 'traditional storytelling' in Archaic and Classical Greece, which was dominated by a system of communication based primarily on orality. These studies stem from the need to open a dialogue between anthropologists, ethnographers, historians of religions and classical philologists. They therefore investigate the forms, modes and functions of traditional narratives from a comparative perspective. The scholars' gaze focus widens to expands to include non-European storytelling traditions, providing, in Weberian terms, models to be applied to historical reconstruction, in full awareness of the sterility of sectorial closures and the need to broaden the interpretative tools of a 'total social fact' such as the Archaic Greek epic.

Der Sprecherwechsel auf der attischen Bühne. Textinterne Regieanweisungen und Aufbau der Rheseis. Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist die Aufbautechnik des tragischen Dialogs.