Hero and Leander on the Hellespont: landscape, memory, and performance
22. November 2012
Prof. Elizabeth Minchin
Arbeitsgespräch des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Kollegs
The story of Hero and Leander and their love is located quite precisely on the Hellespont, establishing a link across the water between Europe and Asia, between the towns of Sestos and Abydos. Although the tale will never carry the social and cultural significance of, for example, the tale of Troy, just nearby, it has nevertheless retained its currency to this very day.
I shall explore the transmission of this tale in literary texts through the ancient world and into the Renaissance, when travellers visited the site and remembered Leander, as well as the strange story of its reception from the nineteenth century onwards, as a Hellespont-based physical challenge, a re-enactment. As I follow the transmission and reception of this tale, I shall draw on research in cognitive and social psychology on the links between landscape and memory, on what we might call the phenomenology of landscape, and on the functions of collective or, more precisely, cultural memory.
Do, 22. November 2012, 18 Uhr s.t.
Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg Konstanz
Otto-Adam-Str. 5
78467 Konstanz
Ansprechpartner
Fred Girod
fred.girod[at]uni-konstanz.de