Lampas - Volume 55, Issue 4, 2022

Abstract The French literary critic Roland Barthes made a notorious attempt in the 1960s to declare the author of literary texts dead. His essay became a true classic in literary and cultural studies. This article places ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) in its intellectual and historical context. First, I will look at the extent to which the essay relates to the thematic issue on minimalism of the American periodical in which it first a Read More

Abstract This article starts from the tendency of ancient critics to ascribe utterances of characters to authors. This, it is argued, is not simply a conflation, but an expression of a view of narration which is distinct from our model of it. Instead of envisaging different narrative levels that are clearly separated from each other, ancient authors and readers viewed the author as impersonating characters in direct speech. This a Read More

Abstract In this paper I take a look at two lyric poems: fragment 31 of Sappho and fragment 130B of Alcaeus. The first-person speakers in these two poems were commonly identified with their authors in antiquity. I argue that this was not the case when the poems were first performed on Lesbos. For the original audience these first-person speakers were general and would not necessarily have been identified with either Sa Read More

Abstract The Appendix Vergiliana is a heterogeneous collection of pseudo-Vergilian poems, consisting in part of primary pseudepigrapha, i.e. poems that self-consciously create the illusion of Vergilian authorship (especially Culex and Catalepton). For centuries, scholarship on these poems has been dominated by the question of authenticity. In the wake of New Criticism, Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) and Foucault’s ‘ Read More

Abstract Until recently, scholars have mainly studied the autobiographical practices of Flavius Josephus to recover the life and thought of this Jewish author. The controversial aspects of Josephus’ life story have resulted in a clear bias of some scholars against this Jewish historian and doubts about his motives for writing so elaborately about his past. The present article breaks with this trend by offering a literary analysis of Josephus’ Read More

Abstract In this contribution I study Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend novels. I link Ferrante’s own pseudonymity with the way in which the classical author Vergil is represented in the series. An important theme in the novels is the appropriation of a female subjectivity by male authors. This theme features most prominently in the relation between Vergil and Queen Dido. Dido is a Leitmotif in Ferrante’s tetralogy: she is both a Read More