Textualization of Experience
Studies on Ancient Greek Literature
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The rhetors and the rhapsodes: notes on two modes of remembering
- Chapter 2 Beginnings and development of technical writing: Fachliteratur
- Chapter 3 Xenophon, Ischomachus, Kikkuli: the transparency of the message
- Chapter 4 The putative empiricism of Aristotle
- Chapter 5 Theophrastus: the world in the text
- Chapter 6 The dried body of Philitas
- Chapter 7 Archimedes and his Sandreckoner
- Appendix. Two medieval traces of experience in the text
- 1) The structure of Isidore’s of Seville Etymologies; or, about the discontinuity of the European cultural remembrance
- 2) The copyist’s suffering and the calligrapher’s joy: on the psychodynamics of writing in medieval Europe
- Bibliography of cited works
- Series index
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the
Library of Congress.
The Publication is funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the
Republic of Poland as a part of the National Programme for the Development of
the Humanities. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the
Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein.
Translated from Polish by the author
ISSN 2196-9779 ∙ ISBN 978-3-631-83282-0 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-83846-4 (E-PDF) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-83847-1 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-83848-8 (MOBI) ∙ DOI 10.3726/b17719
Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non
Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
© Paweł Majewski, 2020
Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien
This publication has been peer reviewed.
About the editors
The Author
Paweł Majewski, professor at the University of Warsaw. His books concern the influence of means of communication on the formation of cultural systems (Writing, Text, Literature, Warsaw 2013; The Speaking Lion, Warsaw 2018; The Feast of the Language, Warsaw 2019) and the works of Stanisław Lem (Between an Animal and a Machine. Technological Utopia of Stanisław Lem, Peter Lang 2018).
About the book
Paweł Majewski
Textualization of Experience
The book is an analysis of Greek Hellenistic literature with the help of conceptual tools of cultural studies and media theory. Its main aim is to describe the cultural process during which Greek authors in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. made the “textualization of experience”, that is, transferred phenomenalistically understood qualities of human sensory experience to the categories characteristic for textual description – as far as possible for them. This process is shown by examples from the works of Xenophon, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Philitas of Kos and Archimedes. The author also tries to show some of the consequences that the phenomenon of the Hellenistic textualization of experience had for the later epochs of European culture.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Table of contents
Chapter 1 The rhetors and the rhapsodes: notes on two modes of remembering
Chapter 2 Beginnings and development of technical writing: Fachliteratur
Chapter 3 Xenophon, Ischomachus, Kikkuli: the transparency of the message
Chapter 4 The putative empiricism of Aristotle
Chapter 5 Theophrastus: the world in the text
Chapter 6 The dried body of Philitas
Chapter 7 Archimedes and his Sandreckoner
Introduction
In the second book of his treatise On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero criticizes the views of the Greek atomists from the school of Epicurus:
At this point must I not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade himself that there are certain solid and indivisible particles of matter borne along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this elaborate and beautiful world? I cannot understand why he who considers it possible for this to have occurred should not also think that, if a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were thrown together into some receptacle and then shaken out on to the ground, it would be possible that they should produce the Annals of Ennius, all ready for the reader. I doubt whether chance could possibly succeed in producing even a single verse! (De natura deorum II, 37, 93)1
Citing this passage of Cicero in a study on the ancient ideas concerning the notion of “element” (stoicheion), Hermann Diels emphasizes its similitude to the shape of fonts in the printing press invented by Johann Gutenberg, and points to the Democritean analogy between the atoms and the letters of the alphabet, enumerating other passages from ancient Greek and Latin texts, whose authors are using this representation too. But for Democritus or Lucretius, the comparison of the elements of matter to the letters of alphabet was nothing more than a visual illustration of their ontological and sometimes ethical views – and for Cicero such a comparison would be intolerable, since it is tantamount to a refutation of meaningfulness and purposefulness of the human world. It is very significant that Cicero mentions The Annals of Ennius – the most significant Roman historical epic before Virgil, of which he was also personally and intellectually fond – as an example of improbable coincidence which would be a random composition of scattered letters into just that poem. The vision of the world as a space of stochastic natural actions was utterly unacceptable for Cicero. In his terms, for the human mind desiring an order of things the world structured by ←9 | 10→chance from atoms and at the same time equipped with internal meaning is unbearable – equally as a text structured from aleatory letters and nevertheless equipped with internal meaning – because isolated atoms and isolated letters are equally nonsensical and meaningless. Through many centuries, in every culture of alphabetic writing, the users of this writing will look for sense and meaning in their world and in their texts, taking for granted – more or less consciously – that on some level of organization of the world and, respectively, of the text, the fundamental configuration of their components somehow obtains its internal cohesion, and that the discovery that cohesion is a crucial task of the human intellect. And when Marshall McLuhan in the middle of the twentieth century will stubbornly repeat that the alphabetic writing creates the modern man in a particular way because it consists of meaningless signs representing meaningless sounds – and at the same time, in its innumerable combinations, creates a canon of cultural texts defining the identity and self-consciousness of its users (who are also the users of culture) – he will also involuntarily repeat the idea of Cicero, though in an approbative context, like Lucretius in Roman antiquity.
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Details
- Pages
- 238
- Publication Year
- 2020
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631838464
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631838471
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783631838488
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631832820
- DOI
- 10.3726/b17719
- Open Access
- CC-BY-NC-ND
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2020 (November)
- Keywords
- writing systems ancient Greece Aristotle cultural studies cultural anthropology Archimedes
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2020. 238 pp., 1 tables.