CfP. Lyric and the Sacred.

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Call For Papers

Lyric and the Sacred, 27 June – July 1 2018, Spetses, Greece

Lucia Athanassaki (University of Crete) and André Lardinois (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) announce the 5th Open Conference which they are co-organizing on behalf of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song (http://www.ru.nl/greeksong).

The conference will take place on the island of Spetses in Greece from June 27th to July 1st 2018. The topic of the conference is ‘Lyric and the Sacred’.

We see two conflicting trends in the study of the sacred in Greek lyric poetry today. The emphasis on the performance of this poetry in the last decades, on the one hand, has suggested that a great number of the surviving songs and song-dances may have been composed for performance in the Panhellenic and local sanctuaries of the gods whom they honoured. Many of them bear unmistakable traces of the strong impression these performances in sacred locales made or were expected to make on all those who were involved, i.e. poets, performers and audiences. On the other hand, scholars have also drawn attention to the fictional element in descriptions of the divine in songs that in all likelihood were composed for more secular occasions, notably for the symposium. Epinician poetry but also recent finds in other genres, such as Sappho’s Brothers or Kypris song, have shown that it is not always easy to distinguish between these types of song. The aim of this conference is to go beyond questions of performance venue and to explore the presence of the sacred from different perspectives.

We invite papers that explore any aspect of the sacred in archaic and classical Greek melic poetry and related genres and we welcome interdisciplinary approaches. Abstracts of 500 words maximum should be sent to Lucia Athanassaki (athanassaki@uoc.gr) and André Lardinois (a.lardinois@let.ru.nl) by November 1, 2017. We hope to announce the programme by December 1, 2017.

Speakers will be offered free accommodation and meals, but no contribution can be made to travel expenses.

Registration for the conference will open on December 1st, 2017.