The Morning Sessions

First Session: Monday, July 2

The title of the first workshop session, „Commenting (comic) fragments: problems and methods“, may suggest a general discussion lacking a concrete focus. The opposite is true: beginning with the commentaries on Phrynichus’ fragments submitted by workshop participants, we have prepared a list of methodological and practical issues that arise when one reads a comic fragment and attempts both to understand it as fully as possible and to make it intelligible to others. In particular, we will consider the following issues:

• organization of the material in the commentary
• citation style(s) of primary and secondary sources, including quotation-style and the appropriate use of modern authorities
• finding and using parallels
• discussing the citation context of a fragment
• dealing with textual matters
• stylistic levels and language registers
• reconstruction of context (speech situations, scenic context, plots, etc.)

The discussion will be organized on the basis of this list, with each point illustrated through examples drawn from the submited commentaries. The goal will be to create a common base of collective experience for the discussions that follow on subsequent days. By the end of the first session, we hope to have created an intellectual basis for the rest of the workshop, and to have developed a simultaneously critical and cordial way of talk with each other.

Morning-Sessions from Tuesday to Friday, July 3-6  

From Tuesday to Friday, we will discuss the materials submitted by Benjamin Millis, Athina Papachrysostomou, Andreas Codispoti and Kostas Apostolakis for that purpose. These are samples of commentaries currently in progress. The discussion will follow the style adopted in the regular colloquia of the project „Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komödie“. Please visit https://www.komfrag.uni-freiburg.de/kolloquium to learn what these sessions are like.

The last session, Saturday, July 7

In our final workshop session, we will return to the commentaries submitted by individual participants in the workshop, and will discuss one fragment from each group. Using insights gained in the previous days, we will try to pose the right questions to produce an ”ideal commentary“.