Arts & Humanities
Lecture Series Schedule for 2008-2009
Featuring Distinguished Alumni
Phebe McClatchy Conley Lecture
Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures and the
Classical Studies Program
“The Romance Between Greece and the East”
Tim Whitmarsh
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Thursday, September 4 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Peters Education Center
Western literature originates with the Greeks ... or so we used to be told. In fact, scholars of ancient literature are now more aware than ever that the earliest surviving Greek texts (the poems of Homer and Hesiod) were heavily inspired by Egyptian and Semitic cultures, as indeed was Greek thought, art and architecture. It is less well-known, however, that Greek culture continued its creative dialogue with the Near East throughout the classical, Hellenistic and imperial periods. Despite what many (including some ancient Greeks themselves) claim, the Greek literary tradition did not become wholly fixed, canonical, impervious to the outside world. This lecture traces the story of the origins of the novel - at first sight the most 'western' of genres - to the contact zones between Greece and the ancient Near East.
Tim Whitmarsh is currently E.P. Warren Praelector at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; he has previously held posts in the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge. A specialist in the Greek literature of the Roman empire, as well as
in literary and cultural theory, he has written or edited a number of books,
including Greek Literature and the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2001), Ancient
Greek Literature (Cambridge, 2004), The Second Sophistic (Cambridge, 2005)
and The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge, 2008).
He is currently interested in ancient fiction, particularly as a means of
bridging different cultures.
