Greek authorship

Greek Views of Authorship

Wednesday, January 23, 13

imitativevs

inspired


How are invention and originality defined in this

cultural model?


Behme:Lastly, I would like to address the issue of terminology and suggest that historians of authorship ethics benefit from being sensitive to the vocabulary used in particular periods and by particular authors. This allows for the identification of relevant precursors to our contemporary concepts while avoiding the anachronistic imposition of contemporary terms. (208)



Lo, many years later:



Solitary


Originary


Proprietary


Sophists


Lauer:• Kairos

• Epistemology



Originality


Theresa:

And here I am also inserting my own expectations for authorship, which I then need to be mindful of, because here I am assuming that a real author writes for non-profit and cares little for fame, as long as he/she writes and is heard by the communities he/she hopes to reach (but then, what is being "heard," and how is this idea of author reception much different from Isocrates desire to have worldly immortality and fame?) ...as you can see, very complicated in my mind.


Seth:What assumptions about authorship, originality, and ownership do both Plato and Isocrates seem to be operating upon? In terms of these three terms, what can we learn through Plato and Isocrates about the cultural/historical differences between Greece circa 500 BCE and America circa 2012?



Phaedrus: 4 sources for initiation of discourse


• inspiration of the muses

• dissonance between two speeches that prompts a third speech

• adaptation to the situation (kairos) by knowing the souls of the audience

• love itself

(Lauer 17)


and, of course:it’s complicated.


Ion



“interpreters of interpreters” (Ion)



poet is set apart through divine association


MouthpieceAvatar

Messenger


Seth:For Plato, the loadstone represents the gods, the muses, the divine origin of authorial inspiration. (That word, inspire, means literally to breathe into. Inspiration always comes from somewhere else. It is in many ways opposed to the connotations of originality and genius often given to it.) The rings, then, represent the circulation of that inspiration, a series of translations and transcriptions and interpretations, whose source is not human.


The Republic


What shall we do with poets and honeyed Muses?


“... we have come to see that we must not take such poetry seriously as a serious thing that lays hold on truth, but that he who lends an ear to it must be on his guard fearing for the polity of his soul and must believe what we have said about poetry” (21-22).



strategies for:

• analyzing discourse & categorizing its matter

• exploring using the 28 topics & special topics

• arts for framing probable rhetorical epistemologies

(Lauer, 19)


Muckelbauer


Documents

Greek authorship