Matthias Grandl előadása

Az ELTE Latin Tanszéke tisztelettel meghív minden érdeklődőt

Matthias Grandl (Freie Universität Berlin)

The Horror of the World. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and the Concept of ‘Enchantment’
című előadására.

Az előadás absztraktja:
Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia emerges from a time in which the Roman geopolitical self-image stakes its claim for a dominion over the whole (natural) world, including the epistemological appropriation of it. Whereas scholarship of the last twenty years has done a lot of excellent work in order to understand Pliny’s encyclopedic project in accordance with the expansion of the Roman empire, my talk wants to challenge this approach and ask about the discrepancies between the allegedly subject world and Pliny’s literary output. His text, as I shall argue, is meant to constantly sound out the margins and the limits both of the empire and the knowledge about it, to glimpse beyond it, to transgress it, and to touch upon the unknowable. These moments of transgression turn Pliny’s Naturalis Historia into a – what I want to call – ‘enchantment’ of the world. The anecdote, for instance, is one of the core elements of Pliny’s narrative apparatus of transgression.

Az előadás ideje és helye:
2023. május 18. (csütörtök), 16:00 óra,
1088 Bp., Múzeum krt. 4/F, 212-es terem