Lacerating Pens, Slaughtering Tongues: Some Thoughts on ‘Agonistic’ Literature in Byzantium - job talk

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Monument Building
Room: 
Popper Room (102)
Academic Area: 
Wednesday, December 9, 2015 - 10:00am
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Date: 
Wednesday, December 9, 2015 - 10:00am to 10:40am

A considerable number of Byzantine texts are polemical. Poets and prose authors lashed out against rivals with a harshness that often surprises us. These texts have often been viewed as  examples of inconsequential satire, or as deplorable excesses of quarrelsome characters. But we can also interpret them as the expression of tensions and rivalries within an elite of intellectuals and teachers. Byzantines themselves clearly delineated a genre of texts they called ‘agonistic’, and attached much importance to it, even if it was sometimes questioned from a moral point of view. Education is an especially important context for this genre. In the meritocratic model that intellectuals proposed, rhetorical and poetic contests are necessary elements in the transition from school to a career. Agonistic literature can often be linked to the phenomenon of the ‘logikos agon’ (battle of words), a social occasion where improvisation and performance played a great role. Literary quarrels also left their traces in collective manuscripts, or took the shape of a continuous exchange of pamphlets. A consideration of these circumstances, such as they appear in texts from the 10th and 11th centuries, may clarify some of the motivations behind the existence of this genre in Byzantium.

Floris Bernard studied classics at Ghent University, Belgium. In 2010, he obtained a doctoral degree at the same university with a dissertation on Byzantine poetry in the 11th century, reworked into a book published by Oxford University Press in 2014. In 2012-2013, he spent a year at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington D.C.) as a Fellow of Byzantine Studies. He has published on poetry and epistolography of the middle Byzantine period, and is the driving force behind a digital database of Byzantine metrical paratexts.

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