El Critic N

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies. Focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative, it triangulates ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches, opening up new vistas within the study of classical literature while ably deploying the ancient material to demonstrate the value of a historical perspective for cognitive studies. Concepts such as immersion and embodiment help to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory. The thirteen chapters presented here tackle a broad range of narrative genres, broadly understood: besides epic, historiography, and the novel, tragedy and early Christian texts are also considered alongside non-literary media, such as dance and sculpture. Authored by international specialists in the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece, each chapter utilizes a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools drawn from cognitive studies, phenomenology, and linguistics that place them at the vanguard of a strong new current in classical scholarship and literary criticism more generally.

The large but underrated corpus of Greek scholia, the marginal and interlinear notes found in manuscripts, is a very important source for ancient literary criticism. The evidence of the scholia significantly adds to and enhances the picture that can be gained from studying the relevant treatises (such as Aristotle's Poetics): scholia also contain concepts that are not found in the treatises, and they are indicative of how the concepts are actually put to use in the progressive interpretation of texts. This book also demonstrates that it is vital to study both ancient terminology and the cases where a particular phenomenon is simply paraphrased. Nineteen thematic chapters provide a repertoire of the various terms and concepts of ancient literary criticism. The relevant witnesses are extensively quoted in Greek and English translation. A glossary of Greek terms (with translation) and several indices enable the book also to be used for reference.

More than anything, perhaps, this volume strives to elucidate the concept of poesie critique, which has received very little attention. This omission is surprising since the genre influenced the Surrealist invention of poesie synthetique as well as many writers who followed Apollinaire, trying to reconcile poetry and criticism.