9:00 AM, 21 Sep 2019 - 5:00 PM, 21 Sep 2019, ORB G27

Unprivileged Pasts, Unwritten Origins

Unprivileged pasts, unwritten origins is Part of Project “RoOTS: Research on Origins, Traditions, and Survival” (PI: Martina Piperno) funded by the Irish Research Council through a New Foundations Grant.

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 c rucial. 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 will meet to discuss how modernity has interrogated ‘subaltern’ antiquities.

All welcome. Organised by CACSSS

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