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Unprivileged Pasts, Unwritten Origins

September 21, 2019

Room G27, O’Rahilly Building, University College Cork

How do we moderns conceptualize the “roots” and the “beginning” of our collective identities? How have the traditions and habits we recognize as ours been shaped in time? How do lost ancient peoples, civilizations, and myths survive in modern imagination? In an era of re-emergence of populisms, increase in hate speech, and resurgence of xenophobia, reflecting on how political, social and personal identities are shaped by our perception of the past is crucial. The reception and re-use of image of the ancient in modern literatures, film, historiography and scholarship can take different forms. However, these are often studied within the boundaries of the discipline of Classical Reception. Despite the wide remit of this discipline, the reception of ‘Classics’ in the widest sense of the term has mostly to do with the transmission of texts. The notion itself of ’Classical reception’ does not always suffice to describe the reception of ancient histories, myths, images, figures: it follows that this notion is sometimes inadequate and a new framework including the reception of primitive, archaic, uncanny, mute, more problematic legacies is necessary. In order to develop new paradigms for understanding the reception of ancient histories, symbols, and myth, and to define how these uncategorized forms of “ancient” legacies survive in modernity, cultural historians with diverse backgrounds interested in how modernity has interrogated other ‘subaltern’ antiquities: more ‘local’ – as opposed to the alleged ‘universality’ of the Classical heritage – and more mysterious – since they left little or no trace of themselves as opposed to the model of the so-called ‘Classical tradition’.

9.00 Welcome coffee and registration

Panel 1: Delving in Darkness

Chair: Dr Clare O’Halloran

9.30:  Prof. John Carey (University College Cork): The Nature of the Fomoiri: Imagining the Dark Other in Medieval Ireland

10.00: Prof. Barbara Goff (University of Reading): Touching in the Dark: ‘natives’ and ‘barbarians’ in the classicising fiction of Naomi Mitchison

10.30: Discussion

11.00-11.30: break

Panel 2: Choosing your ancestors

Chair: [TBC]

11.30 Prof. Nelly Blanchard (Université de la Bretagne Occidentale): The benefits of the Celtic ancestors. From the Celtomanes to the present-day Breton business-model

12.00: Dr Martin Lindner (Universität Göttingen): ‘Ex septentrione lux’ – Nordic High-Culture Narratives in German Documentary Films from the 1930s

12.30:  Dr Kate Hodgson (University College Cork): Memory and the ‘children of Anacaona’: Indigenous Caribbean traces in Haitian writing

13.00: Discussion

13.30-14.30: lunch

Panel 3: Etruscan places

Chair: Dr Daragh O’Connell

14.30: Prof. Maurizio Harari (Università di Pavia):The Etruscans. A myth of the twentieth century between literature and movies.

15.00:  Prof. Bart Van Den Bossche / Dott. Chiara Zampieri (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven): Etruscan myths in early twentieth-century Britain

15.30: Coffee break

15.45: Dr Martina Piperno (University College Cork): The malleability of the Pre-Roman past: challenges, imagination, risks

16.15: Discussion and final remarks

 

The event is funded by the Irish Research Council through a New Foundations Grant

Details

Date:
September 21, 2019
Event Category:
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Organizer

Memory Cluster, Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures, University College Cork
Email
martina.piperno@ucc.ie

Venue

University College Cork
College Road
Cork, T12 K8AF Ireland
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