Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COGNAESTHSYMP (A Cognitively Inflected Aesthetics of the Greek Symposion)
Berichtszeitraum: 2019-03-01 bis 2021-02-28
The most exciting and challenging development in the humanities in the last decade or so has been the recognition that literature and the arts are a fitting object of cognitive inquiry: literature and art in fact are cognition in action, they are both vehicle and instrument of human thought. No body of art lends itself better to be viewed in this way than the visual and verbal art of the ancient Greek symposion. This ritualized wine-drinking party of Greek male citizens was the occasion for the performance of much extant Greek lyric poetry as well as the context of use of most Greek black- and red-figure painted pottery.
This project aimed to apply the documented advantages of a cognitively inflected approach to the particular case of the poetry and painted pottery of the ancient Greek symposion. Its objectives were to produce a methodology for applying the notion of embodied cognition to both the textual and visual sources belonging to the discourse of the symposion, and to attempt to explain the particular affordances of sympotic discourse, in order to explain in turn why sympotic discourse was such a successful way of thinking for Greeks of the archaic and Classical period (and consequently in later eras). In so doing it aimed to produce better interpretations of sympotic literature and painting than have thus far been available, but also to exploit the unique synergy of the language and images in sympotic discourse to cast new light on the peculiarities and interplay of visual and verbal cognition and thus contribute to the cognitive debate beyond the discipline of Classics.
This project aimed to apply the documented advantages of a cognitively inflected approach to the particular case of the poetry and painted pottery of the ancient Greek symposion. Its objectives were to produce a methodology for applying the notion of embodied cognition to both the textual and visual sources belonging to the discourse of the symposion, and to attempt to explain the particular affordances of sympotic discourse, in order to explain in turn why sympotic discourse was such a successful way of thinking for Greeks of the archaic and Classical period (and consequently in later eras). In so doing it aimed to produce better interpretations of sympotic literature and painting than have thus far been available, but also to exploit the unique synergy of the language and images in sympotic discourse to cast new light on the peculiarities and interplay of visual and verbal cognition and thus contribute to the cognitive debate beyond the discipline of Classics.
During the project I have studied extensively both the texts of sympotic poetic fragments and paintings on sympotic vessels, as well as the secondary literature on them and on the application of cognitive approaches to both literature and visual art. I have made a selection of sympotic poetry and pottery for in-depth discussion. I have conducted a study of painted vases at the Musée du Louvre, although its continuation was impeded first by strikes, then by the closure of the Greek vases wing, and finally by the widespread closures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. I have drafted discussions of both a selection of sympotic pottery and a selection of sympotic poetry from a cognitive angle, and a cognitively inflected comparison of the two. I have also undertaken an article comparing one sympotic poem (Bacchylides fr. 20) and a series of sympotic vases. I have had training on working with ancient Greek vases at the Musée du Louvre. I have also attended a seminar series on cognitive approaches in the humanities at the École Normale Supérieure. Several occasions of dissemination in the form of lectures and seminars in France, Greece, Italy, and Japan have had to be postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The core of the project - interrogating verbal and visual discourse in tandem as manifestations of a unified sympotic cognitive ecology, exploiting the unique synergy of verbal and visual art in the symposion - entailed significant progress beyond the state of the art in a thoroughly new direction. Also on the level of methodology, the interdisciplinary combination of literary-critical and art-historical studies inflected with cognitive approaches was novel, as was the close alliance of the concepts of embodied cognition and cognitive affordances. Altogether the application of cognitive approaches to art of antiquity is still relatively new, and in the case of sympotic material it breaks new ground. Upon publication, the resulting monograph will impress a decisive shift from current ways of thinking about the Greek symposion, and about verbal and visual art and their synergy more generally. This impact will be kick-started by the separate publication of the article described above.