Language Use and the Language of Use: Fictions of Normativity in Apollodorus

Language Use and the Language of Use: Fictions of Normativity in Apollodorus

Emily Greenwood, Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

In this seminar I will share work in progress on the politics of language use in Apollodorus’ speech Against Neaera. Scholars of Attic oratory have critiqued the practice of inferring the social norms of Athenian jurors from orators’ rhetorical arguments, but they have paid less attention to the power and violence of mundane language use in creating fictions of normativity. At the same time, work by Rebecca Futo Kennedy and other scholars has complicated our understanding of the precarious agency of metic women. In this project I am grappling with how Apollodorus’ language use creates Neaera as a person who exists for a certain use and can be used, verbally and physically. In the pithy words of Sara Ahmed, “use gives us a sense of things: how they are; what they are like.”

            In preparation for the seminar, please read the texts below. I will start with a 20-minute presentation of selected passages and problems and then we’ll spend the rest of the time in discussion.

 

Click here to dowload readings.

 

Readings:

 

Primary (in Greek or in translation)

 

Greek Edition

Apollodorus Against Neaera – Greek text in Konstantinos A. Kapparis (1999) Apollodoros ‘Against Neaira’ [D.59]. De Gruyter. [This is a bilingual edition and includes an English translation by Kapparis.]

 

English Translation

Kapparis’ translation is also available, in a lightly revised version in Andrew Wolpert and Konstantinos Kapparis Legal Speeches of Democratic Athens: Sources for Athenian History. Edited and translated by Andrew Wolpert and Konstantinos Kapparis. Hackett Publishing, 2011: 177-226.

 

 

Secondary readings:

  • Sara Ahmed (2019) “Using Things”, in Ahmed What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press: 21-67.
  • Peter O’Connell (2023) “Pronouns, Persuasion and Performance in the Athenian Courtroom: Outos in Lysias”, Classical Philology 118/1 (January 2023): 1-26.