From CLASSICISTS mailing list:
Pluralising the Past: Truth, Belief and Fictionality in Tragedy and
Historiography
Celtic Conference in Classics, Bordeaux,
5-8 September, 2012
We would like to invite papers (40 minutes in length) for the above panel at
the 2012 Celtic Conference in Classics. Abstracts (max. 300 words) of proposed
papers should be sent to the panel convenors (details below) by 5pm on Monday,
6 February 2012
SUMMARY OF PANEL
The Greek historiographers repeatedly stress the importance of truth to
history, but they believe in myth, distort facts for nationalistic or
moralising purposes, and omit events which we consider crucial to a truthful
account of the past. Greek tragedy, meanwhile, creates versions of a shared
past that are often sharply at variance with one another. It has often been
suggested that historiography is a branch of rhetoric and that a truthful
account of the past is impossible, while Greek tragedy has often been co-
opted as a paradigm of storytelling and fictionality, but did the producers or
consumers of history and tragedy believe these stories? Work on fictionality in
recent decades has drawn on more relaxed notions of truth, coming out of modal
logic, but the problematic status of Greek myth has often been elided,
particularly in relation to tragedy. This panel investigates the hypothesis of
a pluralistic concept of truth, one where different versions of the same
historical event can all be true, and explores the consequences for our
understanding of culture, Greek or otherwise. This panel invites papers from a
range of theoretical perspectives that discuss truth, belief and fictionality
in relation to individual historians or tragedians, or more generally in
either or both of the genres.
PANEL CONVENORS
Lisa Irene Hau and Ian Ruffell, University of Glasgow
lisa.hau@glasgow.ac.uk
ian.ruffell@glasgow.ac.uk
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Emily Baragwanath, University of North Carolina;
Catherine Darbo-Peschanski, École des hautes études en sciences sociales;
Matthew Fox, University of Glasgow;
Nicholas Wiater, University of St. Andrews;
Matthew Wright, University of Exeter.
ABOUT THE CELTIC CONFERENCE IN CLASSICS
The Celtic Conference in has taken place biennially at different
universities in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and France since 2000 under the
leadership of its founder, Anton Powell. The conference has a good publication
record, and we are intending to collect the papers from the Pluralising the
Past panel into a publishable volume. The complete panel will consist of 15-16
speakers and will run in parallel with 9 panels on other topics at the
conference.
