Terentian scholarship

Venue

Corpus Christi College Oxford and Zoom

Date

Friday, March 8, 2024 - 10:00 to Friday, March 8, 2024 - 18:00

It is now over forty years since Sander Goldberg surveyed the landscape of Terentian scholarship and invoked a ‘crisis’. In that time, there has been considerable progress, in particular, the publication of a series of excellent commentaries and companions. Yet, there remains a sense that the modern Terence, the post-analytic Terence, lacks an identity. As Robert Germany observed, where once he struggled in the shadow of Menander, now the comedian is losing his ‘zero-sum’ game with Plautus: formalist critics, following Niall Slater, have responded to an aesthetic shift, rooted in post-World War II Absurdist theatre, to re-interpret Plautine humour as a remarkable, refined, exuberance; furthermore, historicist critics, like Kathleen McCarthy and Amy Richlin, have transformed the Plautine servus callidus into an animated political subject, overshadowing his pared-back Terentian counterpart. Of course, in the last decade, fresh critical concepts – such as intertextuality, metatheatre, and politeness – have revealed new aspects of Terence’s artistry. Yet there seems a risk of belatedness. In a field still dominated by articles and chapters, rather than monographs, might we end up importing methodologies, once hotly-debated in their original fields, without due reflection? Might their nuanced, theoretical grounding pass us by?

In this workshop, we want to reckon with the state of Terentian scholarship, and set two goals:

To bring out the ‘Theory’ that has informed recent approaches to Terence. To offer one brief illustration, we should not be content to idly historicise. As Rita Felski, for example, has demonstrated, to situate ‘text’ against ‘context’ is a loaded decision. With this in mind, we propose to ask each speaker to acknowledge, explain, and debate, their particular theoretical orientation(s).
To encourage ‘Theory’-inclined scholars, working on adjacent authors, to introduce new critical avenues that may open up Terentian criticism. Such methodological transfer, of course, may not be wholly successful. But we hope ‘failure’ may be as interesting as ‘success’ – in that it may help reveal what is so unique about our dramatist.

Speakers will adopt perspectives informed by psychoanalysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive science, sensory anthropology, subaltern studies, media theory, and the new materialism(s).

Conference Programme

10.00-10.10: Introduction and Welcome

10.10-10.55: Beppe Pezzini (University of Oxford), The Language and Text of Terence: Some Methodological Reflections
10.55-11.40: Erica Bexley (Durham University), Plotting Realism in Terence

11.40-12.00 - Coffee Break

12.00-12.45: Mario Telò (UC Berkeley), The Title's Ungendered Flesh: Terence with Hortense Spillers
12.45-1.30: Domenico Giordani (University of Oxford/UCL), The Cultural Biography of Phormio: Subalternity and Commodification in Terence

1.30-2.30 - Lunch at Corpus Christi

2.30-3.15: Tom Lister (University of Oxford), A Sensory Terence: (Dis)embodiment and (Im)materiality
3.15-4.00: Ruth Caston (University of Michigan), Intersections between Comedy and Philosophy: Skepticism and parrhesia in Terence's Andria

4.00-4.20 - Coffee Break

4.20-5.05: David Youd (UC Berkeley), Terence's Queer Aesthetics: Hecyra and the Death Drive
5.05-5.50: Martin Dinter (KCL), Terence the Intermedial – Referencing Roman Comedy

5.50-6.00: Closing Remarks