Concentus ex dissonis? Aesthetics of Late Latin literary culture in Macrobius, the commentators of Virgil, and the Grammatici Latini
Final Report Abstract
The literature of Late Antiquity (3rd-6th century) emerged in an ongoing dialogue with the literary tradition of Graeco-Roman antiquity on which it was based. Furthermore, it also positioned itself in discourses that concerned non-literary fields such as education, specialised knowledge and cult or religion. Particularly in the field of education, new actors from the Roman upper class and the church adapted techniques and strategies from text types that had previously been used primarily in schools (grammar and rhetoric) in order to serve contemporary modes of literary production and reception. These include compendia, encyclopaedias, commentaries and other, more complex forms of textual knowledge repositories, which in older research were often disparagingly referred to as miscellany literature or auxiliary texts. Against this background, they were mostly used as objects of source research, for example to obtain fragments of otherwise lost earlier texts to which they refer. Recent research on Late Antique literature has supplemented this search for the hidden substrates of earlier literary periods with a perspective that does not perceive the abovementioned text types as mere containers, but focuses on their own textuality as well as their conditions and intentions. While the poetry and prose of the period in particular have already received a great deal of attention, the above-mentioned texts have yet to be analysed in this way. As a result of this change in perspective, the project aimed to prepare a systematic and crosstextual investigation of the aesthetics and poetics of the above-mentioned texts. The core thesis was that new insights could be gained by analysing the texts as an integral part of late antique literary production. Three key points were pursued: 1: It was based on the assumption that an analysis in literary studies can dissect out underlying elements of late antique aesthetics that have been neglected so far in favour of concentrating on the hypotextual level. In this way, it was possible to focus on the genuinely late antique phenomena of literary aesthetics and pinpoint them in the texts. This was done in systematic analyses of text structures at both micro and macro level. 2: A further essential and innovative perspective of the project consisted in analysing the field of tension between the production and reception of literature, which is essentially established in the texts. Particular attention was paid to phenomena that negotiate the respective share in the constitution of the text in literary communication between author and recipient. It could be shown here is that the boundaries between the two poles become programmatically blurred. 3: Closely related to the interactions of production and reception of Late Antique literature in the texts of the corpus outlined above was the question of the programmatic ambiguity of the ontological status of the texts. This point was developed against the background of pairs of opposites: text and intertext, marking and concealment, fragment and whole. This approach revealed a significant advantage over previous global interpretations, which reduced the inherently polyvalent texts to individual lines of interpretation. This oscillation was identified as a central element in the aestheticisation of communication between author and recipient.
