The Conference
Friday 8 March 2024 from 10am to 6pm
Corpus Christi College Oxford and on Zoom

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:

  1. 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). 
     
  2. 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). 

[confirmed speakers: Beppe Pezzini, Mario Telò, Martin Dinter, Domenico Giordani, David Youd, Tom Lister; yet to confirm: Nick Lowe, Erica Bexley, Lewis Webb; format is a 45-minute slot per speaker]

The Seminar 
Wednesdays from 5pm to 6.30pm, 17 January – 6 March 2024
Corpus Christi College Oxford and on Zoom

In anticipation of the conference, we will run a seminar on Terence’s Phormio. This will bring together the ‘close reading’ typical of the Oxford seminar, with big-picture methodological discussion, to create a better understanding of how we have, how we might, and how we should, interpret Terentian comedy. Graduate students and early career researchers will introduce select passages, before we open up to the room for roundtable discussion. Anyone can participate. It is by no means expected that participants will have any prior knowledge of Phormio or of Roman comedy in general. In fact, our aim is to bring a range of different approaches to bear on the text.

[confirmed speakers: Jonathan Katz, Charlotte Susser, Valentino Gargano, David Shipp, Anna-Sofia Alitalo, Matthew Wainwright, Melina McClure, Sebastian Hyams; more to follow…]

Registration

More information about registration will be available in due course.