The IPP Workshop Series

Urban Topography & Augustan Rome | Kyriaki Kipourou

Reading Urban Space in the Antiquity

This workshop aims at exploring space in relation to texts produced during antiquity from the perspective of urbanness (see: I. De Jong. Space in Ancient Greek Literature). Beyond archetypal models of space (Foucault, Bakhtin, Lotman, de Certeau, Lefebvre), the spatial turn has reached the Classical Studies with a certain delay, as chronological applications have exercised a dominant role. In literary studies space has been interpreted as an important carrier of cultural meaning (see: Hallet &
Neumann, Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur) that opens up new ways of approaching pre-modern urbanness.

By analyzing texts from the genre of Roman Satire and focusing on how space shapes the interpretation of a literary text, this workshop will explore the literary representations of urban spaces in the Ancient City of Rome within the poetic framework of the Satires of Horace, Rome's leading poet in the Augustan Era (43 BC-18 AD). In doing so, we will approach certain aspects of space (public and
private) within the eternal city: the streets and the Forum, the bookshop, the home, the baths etc. Following Lefebvre's argument that space is a social product, we will engage in approaching the Roman world by taking the Ancient City of Rome in the poetic satiric discourse as a starting point of urbanness in view of the postmodern spatial turn.

This workshop aims at motivating participants to enhance their perspective about the dialectics of the Classical Literature and modern spatial theory as well as engage in a fruitful dialogue between the classical and modern literature in terms of literary space.

Texts (optional reading)

• Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Transl. by H.R. Fairclough. Harvard University Studio Press Revised edition (1929).

*Please read the Satires 1.8, 1.9 and 2.6

• Stuart, Elden. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. Continuum: New York, 2004.

*Please read from chapter 4 "Reading urban spaces" and from chapter 5 "The Production of Space".