Ancient Near Eastern Literature: Topics, Issues, Approaches

In the last decades the category of ‘literature’ in the Ancient Near East has come repeatedly under scrutiny. It included among other topics fierce discussions about how to define the literary corpus, orality and aurality, the notion of genre,  the validity of historical references in literary works and the fluid boundaries between ‘literature’ and ‘historiography,’ where to locate literary production - school, temple, or palace, and how far the production process determined functional and pragmatic aspects of literary works.  

To isolate literature from its historical context as l’art pour l’art aesthetics favoring formalistic features over pragmatic and historical concerns certainly does not do justice to ancient literary works. While formalistic features such as the use of literary dialects might operate as a way of categorization, recently, due to the nature of the texts, narratology as well as fictionality have been considered equally important. Literature rather should be defined as a particular medium alongside other media as part of the social and cultural discourse. Moreover, what makes an oeuvre historically significant, is not necessarily established by the qualities of the work or by the author but by its history of reception and its intertextuality and intermediality.  The workshop intends to investigate what constituted literary works, how literary works became part of the stream of tradition, were affected by and affected historical conditions, and entered intertextual and intermedial relations.

Seating is limited, please email isaw@nyu.edu to register.

Program

10:00  Introduction - Beate Pongratz-Leisten (NYU, ISAW)

10:30  Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Defamiliar Tales: The Poetics of Early Mesopotamian Fiction

11.30  Coffee Break

12:00  Gonzalo Rubio (Pennsylvania State University)
Textual Promiscuity & Poetic Texture: Smooth Akkadian & Striated Sumerian?

13.00  Lunch Beak

14:00  Johannes Bach (Freie Universität, Berlin)
Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Sargonid Royal Inscriptions

15:00  Coffee Break

15:30  Karen Sonik (Brown University)
Reading Between the Lines: Intertextuality and the Myths of Mesopotamia

16:30  Final Discussion

This is a public event.

To RSVP, please email isaw@nyu.edu.