Riccardo Ginevra
Mailand
Host: Anna Bonifazi
Diskurslinguistik
Forschungsprojekt
Between traditional possibility and impossible reality: compressed mímēsis in Homeric poetry
The aim of our project is to explore how and why the mimetic character of Homeric poetry (famously argued in Chapter 1 "Odysseus' scar" of Eric Auerbach’s 1946 book Mimesis) is often combined with poetic features and narrative details that actually clash with a realistic representation of an event. Such cases arguably reveal that, during their oral-traditional performances, Homeric poets compressed formulaic and thematic materials from a variety of “traditional possibilities” memorized during multiple previous performances, and they did so precisely to achieve mímēsis, that is, a fully perceptible re-enactment of stories. In our interdisciplinary investigation, we apply the cognitive notion of compression to textual analysis. We work on the narrative correspondence between two thematically close texts from the Homeric Greek corpus: a major section of Iliad 24 – describing Priam’s visit to Achilles to ransom his son’s corpse – and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter – the most famous version of the Greek myth of the goddess Demeter’s search for her abducted daughter Kore-Persephone. The correspondences between a series of incongruous details in the poetic and narrative features of these traditional texts index the compression of several traditional themes, including a “catabatic” narrative theme (a literal descent to the land of the dead) that is also detectable in mythological accounts composed in other Indo-European languages, such as Old Norse. The integrated methodology that we propose may thus be employed both for research on the texts of a single tradition and for comparative analyses of texts from multiple traditions.
Riccardo Ginevra
Vita
Riccardo Ginevra is Assistant Professor of Historical and General Linguistics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano (UCSC Milan) and Associate in Historical and General Linguistics at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) in Washington DC. Since receiving his PhD in Historical Linguistics from both the Università per Stranieri di Siena and the University of Cologne in 2018, he has held several research and teaching appointments both in Europe (Cologne, Copenhagen, Würzburg) and in the United States (Harvard CHS). His research deals with the historical, comparative, and cognitive analysis of ancient Indo-European languages and texts, with special focus on Old Norse, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. He is currently working on the development of cognitive-linguistic approaches to Indo-European etymology, phraseology, poetics, and mythology.
Forschungsschwerpunkt
- Poetry and Poetics
- Myth and Mythology
- Historical and Comparative Linguistics
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Comparative Philology
- Indo-European Studies
- Ancient Greek
- Homer
- Old Norse
- Edda
Publikationen (Auswahl)
Monograph:
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2020. Odino Alfǫðr e il nome dei dvergar. Due studi di poetica e mitologia nordica in ottica linguistica e comparativa. Siena: Edizioni Università per Stranieri di Siena.
Journal articles and volume chapters:
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2021. Reconstructing Indo-European Metaphors and Metonymies: a Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Comparative Poetics. AION-Linguistica vol. 10, pp. 163-181.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2021. Metaphor, metonymy, and myth: Persephone’s death-like journey in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in the light of Greek phraseology, Indo-European poetics, and Cognitive Linguistics. In: Ilaria Rizzato, Francesca Strik Lievers, and Elisabetta Zurru (eds.), Variations on Metaphor, pp. 181-211. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2020. Indo-European Cosmology and Poetics: Cosmic Merisms in Comparative and Cognitive Perspective. Archivio glottologico italiano, vol. 104, pp. 5-17.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2020. Gods who Shine through the Millennia: Old Norse Baldr, Celtic Belinos, Old Irish Balar, and PIE *bhelH- ‘be white, shine’. In: Luka Repanšek, Harald Bichlmeier, and Velizar Sadovski (eds.): vácāṃsi miśrā́ kr̥ṇavāvahai. Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 4. bis 7. Juni 2019 in Ljubljana. Hamburg: Baar Verlag.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2020. Foamy Rivers and the Wife of the Ocean: Greek ποταμός ‘river’, Τηθῡ́ς ‘mother of all rivers’, and Proto‑Indo‑European *ku̯eth2‑ ‘foam, seethe’. In: Martti Leiwo, Marja Vierros, and Sonja Dahlgren (eds.), Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL 9), 30 August – 1 September 2018, Helsinki, pp. 99-110. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2020. Myths of Non-Functioning Fertility Deities in Hittite and Core Indo-European. In: Matilde Serangeli and Thomas Olander (eds.), Dispersals and Diversification. Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on the Early Stages of Indo-European (Brill's Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics), pp. 106-129. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2019. Indo-European poetics, mythology, and folktale in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Ὑλοτόμος, ὑποτάμνον, and a new interpretation for lines 227-230 and the Demophon episode. In: Antonietta Porro and Silvia Barbantani (eds.), Δόσις δ'ὀλίγη τε φίλη τε. Studi offerti a Mario Cantilena per i suoi settant'anni, pp. 27-46. Milano: Vita e Pensiero.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2019. Vedic bhiṣáj ‘healer’ (*bhh2s h2éǵ ‘the one who leads to the light’), the Indo European poetics of [LIGHT] as [LIFE] and the mythology of the Aśvins. Incontri linguistici, vol. 42, pp. 67-85.
Ginevra, Riccardo. 2018. Il [DORSO – delle ACQUE] in antico nordico (bak báru ‘dorso dell’onda’) e in antico inglese (sǣs hrycg ‘dorso del mare’): innovazione e tradizione di una metafora indoeuropea in ambito germanico. AION-Linguistica vol. 7, pp. 69-87.