When:
Friday, April 18, 2025
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM CT
Where: Kresge Hall, 4364 (Classics Seminar Room), 1880 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Caitlin Kelley Burney
(847) 491-3230
Group: Department of Classics
Category: Academic, Lectures & Meetings
Please join us on Friday, April 18 at noon in the Classics Seminar Room (Kresge 4364) for a lecture by Professor Sarah Derbew. The abstract for the talk can be found below.
In this talk, I employ a horizontal reading practice to analyze satirical texts from ancient Greek and modern Ethiopian literature. By putting Lucian’s (c. second century CE) “Trial of the Consonants: Sigma against Tau in the Court of the Seven Vowels” and Hama Tuma’s (1993) “The Case of the Traitorous Alphabet” into dialogue, I point out a particular type of linguistic wordplay, which I deem doublespeak, that runs through both stories. In addition to analyzing linguistic manipulations in these texts, I aim to unsettle spatiotemporal divisions between two rich literary traditions.