Event

Speaker: Ralph Rosen, Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Title: "Hipponax, Iambic Laughter and the Question of Genre"

Abstract: Of all the genres of Greek poetry, iambos may well be the most difficult to define and circumscribe. Even in antiquity it resisted categorization by metrical or structural form, and its rambling, episodic content has made it impossible to conceptualize as a single ‘kind’. It is poetry at once elevated and colloquial in diction and narrative, and its picaresque and parodic tendencies give it a stylistically contrarian feel, as does its fondness for aischrology and mockery. Even among scholars of Greek lyric forms, iambos has become something of an afterthought, if not an embarrassment, since it cannot be delineated by form, occasion or content as readily as other genres. Focusing on the particularly problematic iambographer, Hipponax, I will offer a fresh attempt to confront the question of genre in iambos by approaching it as a poetry of comedy and comedic tone, i.e., as poetry that always ultimately aims at the production of some form of laughter in an audience.

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