Saturday April 9, 2016, The Ohio State University
The Agency of Audiences:
Experiencing and Transforming Religious Narratives in Antiquity
The 2016 meeting of MiCAR at the Ohio State University will explore the topic of audiences and religious narratives in antiquity, with the latter broadly construed to include texts, art and images, music/poetry with religious content, sermons, myth, rituals in general or as part of games or festivals, and theatrical performances. The subject of the audience has long fascinated – and perplexed – scholars of religion, whether in their attempts to reconstruct the intended readers of a particular text, or to deconstruct the interpretative matrix within which a particular ritual was performed. Sometimes we can roughly reconstruct the performative context of religious or mythological narratives (e.g., symposiastic epic performance; drama; recitations at festivals); but at other times the constituency of ancient audiences frustratingly escape us (as for the Greek Magical Papyri, Orphic and Gnostic texts). Even when we can pin down the intended initial audience of a religious narrative, readers, listeners, and viewers change over time, affecting not only our reception of the narratives' meaning and function but also shaping the narratives' material form and reception.
We encourage the submission of papers dealing with all aspects of the audience and its relation to ancient religious narratives, but we are especially interested in contributions that approach the audience as an agent in its own right, with the capacity to respond, interpret, shift, shape, and radically change a religious narrative. For instance, how does a shift from an oral to textual audience impact religious narrative? How does a change in the social or political composition of an audience mediate changes in the meaning or significance of a narrative over time? To what extent have ancient authors shaped religious narratives directly in response to audiences, such has been shown in the case of early Christian preachers?
The conference will take place at the Humanities Institute: George Wells Knight House, 104 East 15th Avenue, Columbus OH.
Please submit a title and abstract of nor more than 300 words to either Tina Sessa or Carolina López-Ruiz, no later than September 1st, 2015.