OTHER GENRES OF POETRY

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

Through close reading of a selection of Theocritus’ poems the course aims at familiarizing the students with the generic, thematic, dialectic and metrical variety of the collection. The discussion will focus on intertextuality, mainly on Theocritus’ complex, multi-layered relationship to the poetic tradition and the work of two important contemporary colleagues, Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus.

Through close reading of a selection of Theocritus’ poems the course aims at familiarizing the students with the generic, thematic, dialectic and metrical variety of the collection. The discussion will focus on intertextuality, mainly on Theocritus’ complex, multi-layered relationship to the poetic tradition and the work of two important contemporary colleagues, Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus. Not only heir to a very long and varied literary tradition and a poet sensitive to contemporary sociopolitical realities, but also a poet with prominent metapoetic concerns Theocritus embeds several poetic voices, creating his own fictional universe, including the bucolic tradition and its mythical founders/heroes. Although it is unlikely that he created everything ex nihilo, the extensive loss of previous literature and reliable information about it render the tracing of his debts to it virtually impossible. In this light, Theocritus’ poetry, like the Homeric epics, with which it shares the metrical form and part of the dialect, is viewed and valued as the foundation of a poetic tradition, the pastoral, which reaches up at least to the nineteenth century.

18-01-2017