Sarah Derbew (Stanford University): “Horizontal Reading Practices in Greek and Ethiopian Satire”

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.

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