Cicero, Catullus and the Language of Social Performance

Auteur: Krostenko, Brian
Titre: Cicero, Catullus and the Language of Social Performance
Lieu èdition: Chicago and London
Éditeur: The University of Chicago Press
Annèe edition: 2001
Pages: 360
Mots-clès: Philologie - Filologia - Philology, Rhétorique - Retorica - Rhetorics, Stylistique et genres littéraires - Stilistica e generi letterari - Stylistics and literary genre
Comptes rendus:

Silvestri, Leonor, « Argos », 2001, 25, 166-169

Description: [Abstract] This book is an attempt to contribute to the history of Roman culture, not by analyzing texts, but by examining language itself, and that not as a set of stable signifiers, reliable witnesses to past moments, but as mutable, and manipulable, cultural artifact. In the Roman Republic much of the weight of the perennial clash of style and substance, politics and performance, form and content, fell on a set of approbative terms meaning, "elegant", "witty", "charming", and the like: bellus, elegans, facetus, festivus, lepidus and venustus, which I have called the language of social performance. That language articulated not what was, but what was thought to be; or to put it more precisely, those words, like much approbative idiom, assigned actions and behaviors to ideological categories based on ideological needs. To describe the relationship between those lexemes and the categories they expresses is the object of my study. That description lends itself to the form of a narrative that moves from lexical observations to closer readings: from their several origins (ch. 1), the lexemes of the language of social performance coalesce in the second century in response to the creation of a new aspect of Roman cultural ideology (chs. 1,2), whose successive growth they track from its glimmerings in early first century rhetorical theory (chs. 3, 4) to its flashes in Cicero's speeches (ch. 5), its modulated glow in his de Oratore (ch. 6), and its sirenical gleam in the poetry of Cicero's younger contemporary Catullus (ch. 7). Each work configures the strain between style and substance in different ways, and collectively, through the passages where the language of social performance occurs, they suggestively illuminate an important aspect of the Roman conception of the social world.
Oeuvres:
Liens: https://books.google.it/books?id=IFQMshbZtH8C&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sigle auteur: Krostenko 2001