Journal articles on the topic 'Terence Comedy'

Let me start by quoting a paragraph from a century old edition of Terence, which will serve as a reminder of changes in our background knowledge of both comedy and this particular comic playwright: Of the six extant Terentian comedies the Andria is the most pathetic, the Adelphoe in general more true to human nature than the rest, the Eunuchus the most varied and lively, with the largest number of interesting characters, and the Hecyra the one of least merit. All six are remarkable for the art with which the plot is unfolded through the natural sequence of incidents and play of motives. Striking effects, sharp contrasts and incongruities, which meet us in many plays of Plautus, are almost wholly absent. All is smooth, consistent and moderate, without any of the extravagance of exuberant humour or even creative fancy which characterizes the writing of the older poet. But Terence was essentially an imitative artist and his distinguishing feature was his artistic finish, a fact fully recognized by Horace (Epistle 2.1.59).There is plenty here to question, if not correct. What does it mean to call Adelphoe more true to human nature? What defines an ‘interesting character’? And do present day readers still find Hecyra the play of least merit? As for the art with which Terence’s plots are unfolded, we still cannot guess how much of this is his own contribution rather than derived from Menander (whose plays were still unknown when this edition was written). However, scholars have used both the evidence given by Terence in the prologues and his commentator Donatus to identify where he has himself innovated in his plots—removing the expository prologues to replace irony with suspense, introducing a second lover and slave into Andria, working a braggart soldier and his parasite into Eunuchus and inserting an abduction scene into the second act of Adelphoe. And yet it was Terence’s immediate predecessor Caecilius whom Varro, most learned of ancient critics, praised for his superior plots. Certainly Terence does not indulge in the extravagance of Plautus, but is this because he is ‘essentially an imitative artist’? On the other hand I would not challenge the editor’s evaluation of his scripts as ‘smooth, consistent and moderate’ or his praise for the playwright’s ‘artistic finish’. Instead I would ask if this is what we want, or ought to want from comedy.

Terence, celebrated author of six comedies, has been studied in many classrooms during Antiquity. A witness of this fact is the extensive commentary by Donatus. Among most fathers of the Church, Terence had a bad press. For Lactantius, the eloquence displayed in comedy is altogether pernicious. Augustine singles out a well-known passage from the Eunuch for censure on several occasions. In Renaissance education, nonetheless, Terence remained a prerequisite for mastering eloquence. Erasmus strongly recommended him to teachers of his age. Melanchthon's belief in Terence as a master of excellence in everyday Latin and a model of rhetorical skill was strengthened by his positive appraisal of Terence's moral intentions. In the theological philosophy he developed, ancient ethics acquired a prominent place. Disciples of the praæceptor Germaniæ published extensive commentaries on Terence's comedies. J. Willich carefully defined the moral issues of each individual scene in his surprisingly detailed analysis of Terence's comedies. His commentary (1550) enjoyed considerable fame.

In connection with the beginnings of the Andria, there have been anecdotes and scholarly theories ever since the time of Suetonius and his sources for the Life of Terence, and they intrigued Donatus in his commentary. Naturally, then, they have developed their own influence in the scholarly tradition. An anecdote recounted by Suetonius, who does not name his source, reports that when Terence delivered his play to the aediles of 166 BCE (who would be producing the comedy at the Megalensian Games), he was ordered (or invited, iussus) to read it first to Caecilius Statius (the current grand old man of Latin Comedy). It happened that Caecilius was dining when Terence appeared, dressed with no distinction and therefore earning the coolness of Caecilius. The old man treated him like a servant and had him seat himself on a stool next to his couch and start reading, so as to disturb his dining as little as possible. However, once Terence began reading his play, after only a few verses, he was invited up to Caecilius' couch and proceeded to read through the remainder of the play to the considerable admiration of his host. Now, scholars have had several things to say about this story. First and most commonly, they have pointed out that good evidence fixes the death of Caecilius in 168, roughly two years before the performance of the Andria; and accordingly this story has no factual substance. Good, there is no reason to try to combat facts: this interesting meeting of Caecilius and Terence never happened. However, we do not need to throw away the Suetonian story as useless trivia. The reason someone devised the story was evidently to bring the older generation of comic poetry into contact with the new and to voice its strong approval of its successor's first product, the Andria. Although Caecilius himself may never have known Terence, the plays of the two were linked by a common impresario, Lucius Ambivius Turpio. The didascaliae to all six plays of Terence credit him with being the producer, and in the so-called second prologue of the Hecyra Ambivius reports that he had troubles producing the plays of Caecilius, as he had recently had with Terence's.

Abstract This article examines Erasmus’ additions to the Adagia in 1533 drawn from comedic playwrights Plautus and Terence. Although Erasmus generally expressed a preference for Terence, Plautus is cited more frequently overall in the Adages and the 133 borrowings from Plautus in the 1533 additions drastically outnumber the 22 from Terence. While scholars have noted this numerical discrepancy, few have hazarded concerted attempts to explain it. This article analyzes the different Plautine and Terentian references in the additions of 1533 and reads them in the context of Erasmus’ other educational writings on classical literature and particularly on characters in comedy. Ultimately, two explanations for Erasmus’ apparent preference for Plautus in 1533 present themselves. First, Plautus presented memorable characters who illustrated the tension between eloquence and morality that characterized the debate in Erasmus’ time over comedy’s role in education. Second, Giambattista Pio’s 1500 edition of Plautus with commentary provided Erasmus with other motivations, such as the opportunity for textual criticism, to focus on Plautus.

Within the Terentian corpus thesenes(‘old men’) Simo (of theAndria) and Chremes (of theHeauton Timorumenos) enjoy an extraordinary understanding of the conventions of Roman comedy. While slaves in Plautine comedy certainly exhibit similar knowledge of their genre's conventions, as do the young men who are allied with them (one thinks of Charinus' prologue to theMercator), Plautinesenesdo not usually share in this awareness. This paper focuses on theAndria'sSimo and theHeauton'sChremes because—despite their unusual generic knowledge, which each man reveals in several metatheatrical remarks—they nevertheless misinterpret their slaves. Indeed, we shall see that both men's knowledge of the character type of the clever slave leads to their belief that they can control the slaves and see through their attempts at deception. However, in the end both men actually deceive themselves because their knowledge leads them to see deceptions where there are none—to interpret truth as a fiction contrived by their slaves. Interestingly, Simo and Chremes have something else in common: they both appear in plays whose prologues feature references to an unnamed opponent of Terence—themaleuolus uetus poeta(‘spiteful old poet’). This individual is alleged to have charged Terence with (1) mixing the plots of multiple Greek comedies together in the composition of his own plays, and (2) accepting the help of powerful friends in the writing of his comedies.

Writing of Terence's Andria (‘The Girl from Andros’) in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In the Andria the second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama (Aulularia, Adelphoe), or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' (Duckworth (1952), p. 158). Perhaps in 1993 it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her.

Abstract This contribution provides an introduction to all varieties of ‘Roman comedy’, including primarily fabula palliata (‘new comedy’, as represented by Plautus and Terence) as well as fabula togata, fabula Atellana, mimus and pantomimus. It examines the major developments in the establishment of these dramatic genres, their main characteristics, the performance contexts for them in Republican Rome, and their reception. The presentation of the key facts is accompanied by a description of the influential turns and recent trends in scholarship on Roman comedy. The essay is designed for scholars, teachers and (graduate) students who have some familiarity with Roman literature and are looking for (further) orientation in the area of Roman comedy.

Michael Cronin once described translation as ‘what saves us from having to read the original’. To cite this statement at the start of any discussion of Terence is a little ironic given that critics have not infrequently used his comedies as an opaque glass through which, if only one squints hard enough, one can read the original Greek New Comedy. Noticeably, these lost originals usually live their imagined existences free from the dramatic flaws of Terence's adaptations. For example, Grant writes on the seeming abruptness of Micio's challenge to Demea at Adelphoe 829-31, that in the Greek original ‘the challenge would not have been as abrupt as it is in the Terentian adaptation. The probable reason for the abruptness is that Terence did not realize the difference between Attic and Roman law [on inheritance] in this respect.’ It is certainly possible that he is right, and that Terence omitted something in Menander which caused problems for the flow of his play. It is, however, also entirely possible that the original was similarly abrupt or that there was some other reason for the scene's choppiness than Terence's lamentable ignorance of the inheritance laws of Athens or his poor skills in translation.

Abstract It may be that the French and German authors of La vie du pape Grégoire and Gregorius were so influenced by classical texts as part of their education that these Gregorian legends contain motifs and structural elements of a classical comedy or tragedy. Therefore these legends are compared with twelve comedies by Plautus and Terence.

…mihi prospiciam et Phaedriae.Phormio 1036…I'd better look ahead for my own interest, and Phaedria's.If the anecdotal material from Terence's biography can be trusted, 161 BCE was the playwright's breakthrough year in which he secured his position in Rome as the premier comedian of his generation. At the Ludi Megalenses in April Terence's Eunuch was such a popular success it earned a same-day repeat performance and the unprecedented payment of 8,000 sesterces for its author. In September of that same year Terence was hired by the curule aediles once again to bring another play, the fifth he would compose, to the stage at the Ludi Romani. On that occasion, far from opening his prologue with the vaunting self-promotion of a poet who had recently pleased his audience so thoroughly, Terence returned for the fourth time to his customary complaints against some unnamed old poet who had yet again levelled criticism at his young rival. And while it appears that Terence was simply sticking with a proven, successful formula, in other regards the young poet was in fact showing signs of a new confidence of privileged position by varying from another of his regular compositional practices: he had, he tells his audience, changed the name of the original Greek play by Apollodorus to one of his own choosing: nunc quid uelim animum attendite: adporto nouamEpidicazomenon quam uocant comoediamGraeci, Latini Phormionem nominantquia primas partis qui aget is erit Phormioparasitus, per quem res geretur maxume,uoluntas uostra si ad poetam accesserit.(Phorm. 24-29)Now pay attention to what I want: I bring anew comedy which the Greeks call Epidikazomenos,and Latin speakers entitle Phormiobecause the man who’ll play the chief part will bethe parasite Phormio, on whom the plot will mostly dependif you’ll throw your favour to the poet.

The aim of this paper is to discuss Terence's use of Greek loan-words and to examine their distribution by plays and by characters. How far are they used for stylistic effect and what relationship do they have to the themes of different plays? Is there any evidence for the concentration of these words, which often tend to be colloquial in tone, in the mouths of slaves and characters of low social status for the purposes of linguistic characterisation? Finally, does Terence's use of these words develop in the course of his short career? The usefuleness of a previous note on this subject by J. N. Hough is limited by the absence of any comprehensive list of occurrences, so that its objectivity is difficult to check. A more helpful discussion by P. Oksala gives a fuller list, but concentrates mainly on a comparison with Plautine usage in the type and frequency of these words and does not discuss their distribution within the Terentian corpus.The question of characterisation by linguistic means, particularly in the field of New Comedy, has received considerable attention in recent years. The doctrine that a character's speech should be appropriate to his or her age, sex or social status, is well attested in the ancient world, with reference both to the theatre and to the law-courts. The ancient scholia on Aristophanes, as well as the fourth-century commentary on Terence that goes under the name of Donatus, contain comments on the appropriateness of particular words and phrases to particular character types. Leo, commenting long ago on the distribution of Greek words in Plautus, observed that they were used predominantly by slaves and characters of low social standing, a point made earlier by N. Tuchhaendler. More recently M. E. Gilleland has produced detailed statistical evidence for both Plautus and Terence which tends to back up these observations.

Rashness was one of the most urgent themes and most poignant reproaches in Greek experience and reasoning from the 5th century BC onwards: Thucydides complained of rash actions during the Peloponnesian War that led to disaster; Sophocles showed Deianeira rashly sending the lethal garment to her husband on his return with Iole, and Plato made his Socrates expose the rashness of his interlocutors’ assertions again and again. Small wonder, then that Comedy, especially the New Comedy, seized upon this all-pervading deficiency, as can be seen for example in Menander’s Perikeiromene and Epitrepontes, where impulsive young men nearly destroy their lives by acting and judging precipitately. Roman Comedy naturally followed suit, for example Terence in Heautontimorumenos as well as in his Hecyra, where he followed Apollodorus: time and again his characters assert what they do not know for certain and time and again they act according to unwarranted assumptions, a pivotal theme that hitherto seems to have been underrated.

AbstractHistorians of comedy can profit from a study of the sixteenth-century debates regarding the merits of Plautus (ca. 254–184 BCE), most of whose works were unknown before the late fifteenth century. Early performances and editions led to contemporary theories regarding laughter, language, and morality, often in the context of a comparison with the plays of Terence (d. 159 BCE), who was sometimes viewed as superior by upper-class audiences. From the conflicting opinions of Andrea Navagero and Francesco Florido, to the neoclassical strictures of Daniel Heinsius, this study pursues learned opinion on Plautus as he became a principal author in the European canon. Plautus’s variances from Aristotelian and Horatian precepts created a lively and lasting ferment in discussions of comedy.

Twenty-one plays survive under the name of Plautus. Add the six by Terence and the fragmentary record from Andronicus in the mid-third century to Turpilius late in the second, and the result is a significant corpus with something for nearly everyone: an extensive record of Latin at a key period in its history, a major arena for the Romans' ongoing struggle with Hellenism, a genre more central to later Western drama than anything Greek, and, however well scholarship may sometimes obscure the fact, plays that are genuinely funny and replete with the sights, sounds, and smells of what passes for daily life in the Roman Republic. Small wonder the comoedia palliata once attracted some of the great names in Roman studies. What Alison Sharrock was taught to regard as only ‘a stereotype-ridden exercise in lamentable literary secondariness’ (ix) must from the beginning have meant something quite different to Ritschl and Leo, not to mention Studemund, whose eyesight never recovered from the strain of transcribing the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus. How did the study of comedy ever become a literary backwater? And what has happened to it since?

Where social relations are concerned, the servile condition was the joker in the pack: the true slave could be given a different value or significance according to prevailing principles of social organization. The slave was an outsider without a past or a future, without separate interests or compromising associations. In principle the slave was a creature of his or her owner. If necessary, the slave could act as a surrogate. The slave condition cancelled out all prior belonging or autonomy and enabled the slaveowners to claim the slave's reproductive powers, productive energy, administrative or military capacity and personal initiative.Blackburn (1996), 161Boiled down to its essentials, domestic comedy is about the business of getting and begetting, about economics and reproduction. True, it might be more fair to say that it is about the sense individuals have about their own roles and actions in these enterprises—about love and fear and regret, for example—but the twin concerns of household wealth and the status of future generations provide the structure within which these emotions take on meaning. To be more precise, these concerns are not just twinned, but are part of a single process which we might call ‘familial reproduction’, i.e. the process of using material, cultural and biological resources to stabilise the family's identity and status in the present and to extend the family's identity and status into the future. One important resource that Roman families drew on was the rich and manifold resource of the slave members of the familia.

Summary:The paper deals with the ways of expressing evidential and mirative semantics in the language of Roman comedy. The author claims that the phenomena under consideration belong to the grammar rather than to the lexicon of the Latin language, and shows that various evidential and mirative values can be expressed by the use of verbal tenses, voices, moods and syntactic construction. It is stressed that evidential and mirative functions in such units result only from the interaction of different linguistic parameters within a certain context and does not reside in the units taken in isolation. The main focus of the study is on the linguistic techniques which were preferred by Plautus and Terence. The comparative analysis of the linguistic strategies found in the author's present and the previous research demonstrates that the choice of a particular strategy depends on a given genre. Thus, some strategies (e.g., impersonal passive, inferential perfect and future, imperfect of a truth just recognized, mirative use of the subjunctive and infinitive) are preferred by comic poets while other techniques (e.g., deductive use of debere, gnomic future as a reportative strategy, cum inversum as a mirative device) which may be used in historic or epic narrative, never occur in the language of Roman comedy.

After an illustrated Latin edition of the comedies of Terence in 1496, the Strasbourg printer Johannes Grüninger published the first German translation of all six comedies in 1499. The translators remain unnamed, but follow in organization of text and its additions the German Terence-comedy 'Eunuchus' (Ulm 1486). According to the 1496 latin edition the function of the woodcuts are precisely explained in erklerungen. The study focusses on the memorative and didactic attempts as well as the differences to the Latin edition. Nach einer sehr erfolgreichen illustrierten lateinischen Ausgabe der Terenz-Komödien im Jahr 1496 brachte der Straßburger Drucker Johannes Grüninger 1499 die erste deutsche Übertragung aller sechs Komödien heraus. Die Übersetzer bleiben ungenannt, richten sich jedoch in einem Vorwort an den Leser, worin sie ihre Übersetzung rechtfertigen. Die Organisation des Textes und der Beigaben orientiert sich an der Übertragung der Terenz-Komödie 'Eunuchus', die 1486 in Ulm erschienen war. Zur Bebilderung dienten die Holzstöcke der lateinischen Terenz-Ausgabe Grüningers, in welcher die Funktion der Holzschnitte in gleichzeitig sichtbaren Declarationes Figurae genau erklärt wird. Diese werden hier als Erklerungen in abgewandelter Form ins Deutsche übertragen. Die memorativen und didaktischen Bestrebungen sowie die Unterschiede zur lateinischen Ausgabe und die Verlagerung von inhaltlichen Schwerpunkten stehen im Fokus der Untersuchung.

Despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary, the running slave (‘servus currens’), and particularly the often lengthy entrance monologue of the running slave, is generally considered a distinctly Roman phenomenon, an exuberant growth of the Latin soil, albeit from Greek seed.1 There are two reasons for this. One reason is the frequency with which the motif appears in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, in sharp contrast with the absence of any single undisputable New Comic example. The second reason is Eduard Fraenkel'sPlautinisches im Plautuswhich, sixty-five years after its publication, remains the most authoritative scholarly work in the field of Roman comedy. In this book Fraenkel argues that Plautus' running-slave scenes, particularly the monologues of theCurculio(280–98) and theCaptivi(790–828), are a veritable nexus of original Plautine traits.

AbstractThe ancient theoretical debate on language and its purposes has long concerned scholarship, but only in recent years a growing attention has been directed to ancient concepts and instances of nonsense in both communication and artistic-literary expression, as the recent monograph by Stephen Kidd attests. This paper engages in an analysis of the phrase οὐδὲν λέγειν/nihil dicere, used to express the nonsense of a statement. An overview of the occurrences of οὐδὲν λέγειν is followed by a survey of what can be considered the ‘reception’ or calque of the Greek idiom in Latin, namely nihil dicere. The concentration of the occurrences, both in Greek and Latin, in the same two genres, i.e. comedy and philosophical dialogue, suggests that the phrase was borrowed from the colloquial vocabulary of the spoken language. The authority of Aristophanes and Plato seems to have eased the assimilation of the locution by authors such as Plautus, Terence and Cicero. The rarity of the phrase outside these authors and their genres supports the thought that, in literature, οὐδὲν λέγειν/nihil dicere were typical of the lexical repertoires of dramatic ἀγών and dialectics.

This paper offers a pragmatic analysis of a rarely used construction in Classical Spanish: an emphatic comparison of equality with optative illocution A comparative sentence such as Así me ayude Dios como fue buena mi intención (’May God help me just as my intention was good‘) is used for emphasizing the assertion fue buena mi intención (’my intention was good‘) This construction is probably a Latinism It occurs in Latin, especially in Plautus and Terence, and is mostly attested in Spanish in humanistic comedy and in the Celestinesque tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The first member of the construction is interpreted at the pragmatic level as a reinforcer of the illocutionary force of the comparative construction as a whole, which expresses an indirect assertive speech act Speakers perform this type of act by satisfying its sincerity condition: they believe that the event of the second member is true, because if it were not, they would run a risk, i.e. the optative would entail a curse for themselves By contrast, when the event is true, the optative entails a good wish for themselves This paper also analyzes how the pragmatic properties of the construction are reflected in its semantic and morphosyntactic properties

Homme aux savoirs multiples et homme de vulgarisation, Charles Estienne (1514–1564) s’intéressa à la traduction et à l’édition théâtrale parallèlement à ses activités éditoriales et scientifiques, tant en latin qu’en français. Non pas en marge, mais au centre d’une carrière consacrée à la parole du partage des savoirs, l’intérêt pour le théâtre de Charles Estienne se manifeste d’abord par la traduction française d’une comédie italienne contemporaine, rééditée au moins deux fois, puis par des éditions annotées pour la jeunesse d’une comédie de Térence, l’Andrie, qui se continuent par la traduction française de cette comédie, accompagnée d’un traité sur les Jeux des Anciens. Ces deux pièces de théâtres sont représentatives de l’entreprise de Charles Estienne visant à rendre accessible à un plus grand public les grandes oeuvres du passé classique comme de la modernité italienne. Surtout, ces textes sont conçus pour la représentation, dans un cadre éducatif mais aussi, simplement, pour le plaisir du spectacle théâtral. La mise en français, mais aussi la mise en lisibilité (par des lexiques, annotations, commentaires, abrègements etc.) paraissent de fait constituer une mise sur scène du texte source, qui sera dit lors de la représentation mais également par son médiateur, le vulgarisateur (qui traduit, édite, rend compréhensible et diffuse). Ainsi, la traduction pour la scène illustre une parole humaniste, de la transmission et du partage des savoirs : une représentation de la reprise et de la vulgarisation. A man of much learning and a man of popularisation, Charles Estienne (1514–1564) was interested in theatrical translation and edition both in Latin and in French, as well as in many other editorial and scientific activities. Interest in theatre was at the centre of Charles Estienne’s career consecrated to knowledge sharing; it manifested itself first in the French translation of a contemporary Italian comedy, re-edited at least twice. Then he produced several annotated editions for young people of a comedy by Terence, Andria. These were followed by the French translation of this same comedy, accompanied by a treatise on the Jeux des Anciens [Plays of the Ancients]. These two plays are representative of Charles Estienne’s endeavour to make the great works of from classical past as well as contemporary Italy accessible to a wider public. Above all, these texts are designed for performance, in an educational context but also simply for the pleasure of theatrical spectacle. The rendering of the French, and the rendering of readability (through lexica, annotations, commentaries, abridgements etc.) stage the source text, which would be spoken during the performance but also stage its mediator, the populariser (who translated, edited, made comprehensible and disseminated the text). Thus translation for the stage illustrated a humanist position on the transmission and sharing of knowledge: a performance of revival and popularisation.

Hasta el siglo XV la literatura castellana no conoce una verdadera terminología dramática. Para sus creaciones en distintos géneros los autores utilizaban términos imprecisos e inconsecuentes. En el siglo XV surgieron los primeros »comentarios« dramáticos, reducidos a breves notas, partes de poemas o introducciones a otras obras literarias. El primer intento de definir los términos del teatro clásico - la comedia y la tragedia - en latín vulgar data del año 1438 o 1439: el poeta Juan de Mena (1411-1456) escribió en el Segundo preámbulo a la Coronación que los poetas escriben en tres estilos - »tragédico, satfíico o comédico«; el primero se utiliza en la escritura »que habla de altos hechos y por bravo y soberbio y alto estilo«, comienza »en altos principios« y acaba »en tristes y desastrosos fines«; y en cuanto al tercer estilo dice: »El tercero estilo es comedia, la cual trata de casas bajas y pequeñas y por bajo y homilde estilo, y comienza en tristes princi­ pios y fenece en alegres fines, del cual usó Terencio.« La referenda a Terencio es significativa, porque la teoría dramática española se formó en estrecha relación con las inter­ pretaciones de los comentaristas de Plauto y Terencio. En la definición de la comedia de Mena hay dos elementos importantes: la bajeza de las casas tratadas y el estilo humilde, por un lado, y el final alegre, por el otro.

In the prologue of Terence'sEunuchus, written, according to the didascalia, in 161 BC, the author of the play defends himself against the charge of literary theft. He denies completely any knowledge on his part that the Greek plays he had combined to produce his own play had already been translated into Latin. In the alternative, he argues against the charge of comic theft by way of the very nature of stock characters. ‘If’, argues Terence, ‘a man isn't allowed to make use of the same characters [personae] as other writers, how, all the more, is he allowed to write of the running slave, to make his matrons good and his prostitutes wicked, his hanger-on greedy, his soldier arrogant; how is he allowed to have a child substituted, an old man deceived through his slave, to love, to hate, to be suspicious?’ This last line —amare odisse suspicari— aims to evoke the characteristic attitude of the comicadulescens, whose emotional vacillation is presented as just another stock aspect of the genre, a literary inheritance as clich6d as any of the comedy's archetypal stock characters. ‘Nothing is said nowadays which hasn't been said before’, concludes Terence. Mid second century BC, and the Latin literary lover is already afflicted by textual, as much as emotional, exhaustion.

Uno de los mitos clásicos que aparecen en la novela intercalada cervantina, El curioso impertinente, el del rapto de Dánae, no ha recibido mucha atención crítica. Las muchas imágenes visuales de la novela cervantina recuerdan la écfrasis de este mito en el Eunuco de Terencio, donde la pintura es una de las causas del rapto de Pánfila. La novela cervantina se hace eco de la controversia que había suscitado el Eunuco, comenzando con San Agustín; controversia que continuó hasta el Siglo de Oro con escritores tales como Juan de Mariana y Juan de Pineda. El estudio de la comedia de Terencio y de la pintura de Dánae enviada por Tiziano a Felipe II ayudan a comprender la importancia del mito como elemento temático y estructural en la novela. La historia de Dánae en Cervantes forma parte del debate sobre el impacto de las artes visuales en la época de la Contrarreforma.

Antes de aceptar la pertenencia de Celestina al ámbito dramático y la comedia clásica romana como uno de sus modelos, es necesario aclarar de manera satisfactoria un problema determinante: la total ausencia, en Castilla, de documentación acerca de representaciones de comedias de Plauto y Terencio a finales del siglo XV. Aunque algunos estudiosos hayan afirmado que en esta época solían representarse en España las obras de estos dramaturgos latinos, desgraciadamente no han aducido evidencia o prueba ninguna en apoyo de sus aseveraciones, por lo que nunca se han podido confirmar históricamente tales prácticas teatrales. Esta creencia infundada ha surgido, probablemente, de la voluntad de querer homologar la tradición teatral de la península italiana del último cuarto del siglo XV a España. Sin embargo, esta evidente incongruencia persiste y no ayuda en nada a explicar la génesis de Celestina.

Resumen El presente ensayo, Dramaturgia Carnavalesca o Festiva, de un tal Fernando Duque Mesa, es una reflexión sobre una de las búsquedas colectivas e individuales, más interesantes que se han venido dando por parte de muy diversos grupos teatrales colombianos experimentales o no, como latinoamericanos, en especial desde la década de los setenta hasta el momento presente, basadas en las fuentes carnavalescas o festivas de los más grandes creadores de la literatura universal popular como: Aristófanes, Menandro, Plauto, Terencio, Teatro Popular Medieval, La Comedia del Arte, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Lope de Rueda, Félix Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, William Shakespeare, Moliere, Francois Rabelais, Giovanni Bocaccio, hasta llegar a Alfred Jarry, Gabriel García Márquez, Santiago García, Enrique Buenaventura, Juan José Arreola, entre muchos otros. Creaciones dadas en un tiempo y en un espacio en el que se comienza a ver y analizar desde las prácticas de la escena, los más diversos y complejos procesos histórico-sociales de ayer y del momento presente.Palabras ClavesDramaturgia Carnavalesca o Festiva; Carnaval; Carnavalidad; Fiesta Popular; Lucidez Crítica

El presente ensayo continúa la reflexión acerca de la Dramaturgia carnavalesca o festiva, enfocada en las búsquedas colectivas e individuales, más interesantes que se han venido dando en la práctica por parte de diversos grupos teatrales colombianos experimentales y latinoamericanos.Desde la década de los setenta hasta el momento presente, teniendo como referente las fuentes carnavalescas o festivas por parte de los grandes creadores de la literatura universal popular como: Aristófanes, Menandro, Plauto, Terencio, Teatro Popular Medieval, la Comedia del Arte, con Ángelo Beolco (Ruzzante), Carlo Goldoni, Pietro Aretino, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Lope de Rueda, Félix Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, William Shakespeare, Molière, François Rabelais, Giovanni Bocaccio, hasta llegar a Alfred Jarry, Bertolt Brecht, Darío Fo, Franca Rame, Gabriel García Márquez, Santiago García, Enrique Buenaventura, Juan José Arreola, entre muchos otros.Creaciones dadas en un tiempo y en un espacio en el que se comienza a ver y analizar desde las prácticas de la escena, los más diversos y complejos procesos histórico-sociales.

The paper examines the way Terence's comedy was received and exploited by the dramas of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim. The discussion focuses on a particular comic motif: rape. After the examination of the way Hrotswitha transforms Terentian rapes and incorporates them into her dramatic composition, the paper focuses on a very important spectrum of Terence's survival: education. Specifically, it explores how rape was read and interpreted by the most important treatise of Terence's exegesis: the commentary of Donatus. All in all, the paper aims at identifying possible common approaches between the educational and literary sources under examination, while, at the same time, investigates the extent to which the educational context of Terence's reception affected the literary products that used Terence as their prototype.

SummaryAfter reading the palliata comedy, we have checked that the frequentative suffix is very often used by Plautus and not so much by Terence. Starting from that consideration, we have analyzed the

AbstractThis article investigates multiple pragmatic facets of Latin greeting as depicted in the corpus of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence). To this end, different frameworks are combined, including Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory, and the most prominent (Im)politeness Theories. The complexity of the greeting phenomenon is first demonstrated by identifying its position inside the opening section of the dialogue with possible reductions, elaborations, and substitutions. Thus a heterogeneous group of greeting tokens is retrieved from the comedy corpus, which, furthermore, fit the speech-act theoretical description of the greeting as a behabitative (Austin), expressive act (Searle) or acknowledgment (Bach and Harnish). Moreover, the paper briefly signalizes the contact-oriented (phatic) functions of the salutation ritual as access display (Shiffrin) or its use as a mechanism of (re)producing the social order (Schegloff). The main part of the investigation, however, is devoted to the greeting formulae and their linguistic variation in Plautus and Terence. After briefly presenting the classical model of (im)politeness (Brown and Levinson), the paper relates the speech-act formulation of the expressions to positive- or negative-politeness strategies. Finally, the article applies the frame-based analysis of the politeness’ formulaic language, as proposed by Terkourafi. The dialogue openings are classified according to their broader extralinguistic context (e.g. participants, temporal setting, the reason for the encounter) into several situational frames. In the last section of the paper, the (im)politeness value of the greeting expressions is revised in relation to their adequacy to a given situation type. In result, some instances of using the formulae inappropriately (i.e., out of frame) are given, which demonstrate the complex interpersonal dynamics of the verbal interaction depicted by Plautus and Terence.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony and his friends use “prosthetic memories” to anchor their ethnic and criminal identities. Prosthetic memories were theorised by Alison Landsberg in her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. She argues that prosthetic memories are memories acquired through the mass media and do not come from a person’s lived experience in any sense (Landsberg 20). In this article, I will outline how The Sopranos television show and its characters interact with prosthetic memories. Extending Christopher Kocela’s work on The Sopranos and white ethnicities, I will show how characters use prosthetic memories to define their ethnicity while the show itself knowingly plays with this to provide comedic and critical commentary about the influence of gangster stereotypes. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories are powerful memories of historical events or narratives that an individual was not present for. They are typically formed at the "interface between a personal and historical narrative about the past at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum" (2). It is at such a moment that a person can suture themselves into a larger history. Consequently, these memories do not just enhance an individual’s apprehension of a historical event. Rather, they create a deeply felt personal memory of a past event through which they did not live (Landsberg 4). Prosthetic memories are largely made available through the technologies of mass culture such as film, television and experiential places like museums. Their accessibility helps to differentiate them from other cultural strategies for passing on memories to future generations. Other strategies have typically been rooted in the cultural or racial status of an individual (Landsberg 22). In addition, Landsberg asserts that the successfulness of mnemotechnic rituals like the Jewish Passover Seder is dependent on ethnicity (26). Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels concludes that these rituals can only be effective if the individual has “some prior assumption of identity between you and them and this assumption is often racial” (680). Contrastingly, the perpetuation of prosthetic memories through mass media makes them widely accessible across racial lines. According to Landsberg, they are not “naturally- ethnically, racially or biologically- one’s intended inheritance” (26). Prosthetic memories introduce the possibility that memories can be acquired by anyone. The technologies of mass culture make these memories portable and as such, challenges the assumption that memory is “in anyway essential or organically grounded or the private property of a specific ethnic or racial group” (27). In The Sopranos, most characters are third or fourth generation Italian immigrants. Much like for many ‘real’ Italian migrants, time has severed familial connections to their homeland (see Landsberg 49-55). Landsberg suggests that immigrants initially became Americanised in order to escape persecution and being labelled as “other” (51). This meant that ethnically exclusive mnemotechnic rituals were not preserved for subsequent generations of immigrants. In order to sustain an ethnic identity, immigrants (and the characters in The Sopranos) have been forced to turn to more accessible tools like prosthetic memories. Christopher Kocela’s analysis of Italian-Americanness in The Sopranos, argues that characters maintain an Italian American ethnicity while still racially identifying as white. According to Colin Webster “white ethnicity” can be best exemplified through the long tradition of European immigration to America (295). With the influx of immigrants, there was a codification of the idea that “some whites are ‘whiter’ than others” (Webster 297). European working-class immigrants struggled to be afforded the same white “privileges” and membership to the white race. Instead, they were defined as being members of “other” white ethnicities. Roediger argued that such a denial of whiteness pushed European immigrants to insist on their own whiteness by defining themselves against other ethnic minorities like African Americans (8). Between 1890 and 1945, eventual assimilation saw white ethnicities become “fully white” (Roediger 8). Webster argues that: “In this sense, whiteness is nearly always salvageable in a way that black, Mexican, Asian, and Native American ethnicity is not (sic)” (Webster 297). In a similar vein, Kocela suggests that the assimilated characters in The Sopranos benefit from their white racial status while still maintaining an Italian ethnicity. This celebration of ethnic difference by Tony and his friends can serve as a smokescreen for the silent maintenance of whiteness (Kocela 14). Kocela suggests that the show critiques these types of responses that characters have to their ethnicity, stating that "we do not learn from The Sopranos the language of ethnic sons deprived of their Italian godfathers, but the language of racial misrecognition spoken by sons whose lost white fathers were never really their own" (16).Kocela’s article provides a useful discussion about the relationship that characters in The Sopranos have with their ethnicity. This article extends this discussion by showing how prosthetic memories and characters’ understanding of mass media are a crucial element in how such ethnic identities are formed. This will lead to a discussion about how The Sopranos comments on and treats these adopted stereotypes. “What do poor Italian-immigrants have to do with you?”: How Characters Interact with Prosthetic MemoriesCharacters in The Sopranos heavily rely upon stereotypes from gangster films to perform their version of Italian Americanness. A reliance on prosthetic memories from such films leads to the manifestation of violence being intertwined with the characters’ ethnic identities. Brian Faucette has discussed the inherent link between violence and gangster films from the 1930s-60s. He claims that “it was violence that enabled the upward mobility of these figures” (76). It is almost impossible to separate violence from the gangster films referenced in The Sopranos. As such, violence becomes part of the ritualistic ways prosthetic memories are created. This is evident in the pilot episode of The Sopranos when Christopher performs his first hit (kill). In the scene, he shoots rival gang member, Emil, in the back of the head at Satriales Pork Store. Before the hit, the pair are standing close together in front of a pinboard collage of “classic” Italian movie gangsters. As they both walk away in opposite directions the camera pulls out diagonally to follow Christopher. Throughout the duration of the shot, the collage is always placed behind Christopher. Finally, when the pan stops, Christopher is positioned in the foreground, with the collage behind him to the right. The placement of the collage gives it a front row seat to the ensuing murder while serving as a kind of script for it. It is not enough for Christopher to simply kill Emil, rather it is important that it is done in the presence of his idols in order to ensure his enhanced identification with them. Moreover, for Christopher, being an Italian American gangster and violence are inseparable. He must perform acts of extreme violence in order to suture himself into a larger, stereotypical narrative, that equates Italian-Americanness with the mafia. Through Landsberg’s theory, it is possible to see the intertwined relationship between performances of Italian-Americanness and violence. To enact their version of Italian-Americanism, characters follow the script of masculine-violence inherent to gangster films. As well as tools to perform Italian American identities, prosthetic memories can be used by characters to deny their whiteness. Kocela argues that Tony can deny or affirm his whiteness, depending on the situation. According to Kocela, Tony’s economic success is intrinsically linked to his racial status as a white man (16). However, this is not a view shared by characters in the show. In the episode From Where to Eternity Dr. Melfi asks Tony how he justifies his criminal lifestyle: Tony: When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ... The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, and family, and loyalty. ... Now we weren't educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.Dr. Melfi: That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you and what happens every morning when you step out of bed?Kocela describes Tony’s response as a “textbook recitation of the two-family myth of Italian-American identity in which criminal activities are justified in a need to resist assimilation” (28). It is evident that for Tony, being Italian American is defined by being ethnically different. To admit that whiteness contributes to his economic success would undermine the justification he gives for his criminal lifestyle and his self-perceived status as an Italian American. Despite this, Melfi’s statement rings true. The experience of “poor Italian immigrants” does not affect Tony’s daily lifestyle. Characters in The Sopranos do not face the same oppression and discrimination as first-generation migrants (Kocela 28). After decades of assimilation, Tony and his friends turn to the narratives of discrimination and ethnic difference present in gangster films. This is exemplified through Tony’s identification with Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Vito exemplifies Tony’s notion of Italian Americanism. He was a poor immigrant that turned to criminality to protect the Italian-American community and their way of life. Vito is also connected to Italy in a way that Tony admires. When Paulie asks Tony what his favourite scene from The Godfather is he responds with: Don Ciccio’s Villa, when Vito goes back to Sicily, the crickets, the great old house. Maybe it’s because I’m going over there, ya know? Gangster films and representations of Italian-Americanness often deliberately differentiate Italian families from “regular” white people (D’Acierno 566). According to D’Acierno, gangster narratives often involve two types of Italian families, one that has been left powerless by its assimilation to American culture and another that has resisted this through organised crime (D’Acierno 567). Tony and his friends tap into these narratives in their attempt to create prosthetic memories that differentiate their ethnicity and ultimately draw attention away from the whiteness which silently benefits them.The “inauthenticity” of these prosthetic memories is probably most pronounced in the episode Commendatori when Tony, Christopher and Paulie visit Italy. The trip shatters the expectations that the characters had of their homeland and sheds light on some of their delusions about what it means to be Italian. Paulie expects to love Italy and be greeted with open arms by the locals. Unfortunately, he dislikes it all because it is too foreign for him. At the banquet, Paulie finds the authentic Italian octopus uneatable and instead orders “spaghetti and gravy.” He is also unable to use the bathrooms because he is so used to American toilets. When at a local café he tries to initiate conversation with some local men using broken Italian. Even though they hear him, the group ignores him. Despite all this Paulie, pretends that it was a great trip:Big Pussy: So how was it?Paulie: Fabulous, I felt right at home… I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t been … especially any Italian. The prosthetic memories that defined these characters’ perceptions of Italy are based on the American media’s portrayal of Italy. Commendatori thus exposes the differences between what is “authentically Italian” and the prosthetic memories about Italy generated by American gangster films. By the end of the episode it has become clear that these “inauthentic” prosthetic memories have forged an entirely different, hybrid ethnic identity.“Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes”: How The Sopranos Treats Prosthetic MemoriesIntertextuality is an important way through which the audience can understand how The Sopranos treats prosthetic memories. The prosthetic memories generated by characters in The Sopranos are heavily based on stereotypes of Italian Americans. Papaleo states that the Italian stereotype is “composed of overreactions: after bowing, smiling and being funny, the Italian loses control” (93). Mafia films are crucial in defining the identity of Tony and his friends, and David Pattie suggests that they are a “symbolic framework within which Tony, Paulie, Christopher and Silvio attempt to find meaning and justification for their lives” (137). In a similar way, the audience is invited to use these same films as a frame for watching The Sopranos itself. Mafia stereotypes are one of the dominant ways that depict Italian Americans on screen. According to Larke-Walsh, this has perpetuated the belief that crime and Italian-Americanness are synonymous with each other (226). The show is obsessively referential and relies on the viewer’s knowledge of these films for much of its effect. Pattie describes how such use of intertextuality can be explained: "[there are] two ways of looking at self-referential programs: one in which readings of other media texts can be contained first of all within the film or program in which they occur; and a more covert type of referential work, which relies almost exclusively on the audience’s detailed, constantly-updated cultural intelligence" (137). The Sopranos operates on both levels as references that are simultaneously textual and meta-textual. This is evident through the way the show treats The Godfather films. They are by far the most frequently mentioned ones (Golden 95). According to Chris Messenger, the central link between the two is the acknowledgement that “America itself has been totally colonised by The Godfather” (Messenger 95). The Godfather is an urtext that frames how audiences are invited to view the show. As such, The Sopranos invites the viewer to use the Godfather as a lens to uncover extra layers of meaning. For example, The Sopranos uses the misguided ways in which its characters have taken on stereotypes from The Godfather as a source of humour. The series plays on the fact that characters will allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour. In the pilot episode, Christopher calls “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero to help him dispose of a body. Christopher informs Pussy that it’s his plan to leave the body at a garbage stop to be discovered by the rival Czechoslovakians. Christopher hoped this would emulate the “Luca Brasi situation” from The Godfather and intimidate the Czechoslovakians. When he explains this to Pussy, they have the following exchange. Pussy: The Kolar uncle is gonna find a kid dead on one of his bins and get on our fuckin’ business… no way!Christopher: Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.Pussy: Luca Brasi… Luca! There are differences Christopher… okay… from the Luca Brasi situation and this. Look, the Kolar’s know a kid is dead, it hardens their position... plus now the cops are lookin’ for a fuckin’ murderer!To members of the audience who are familiar with The Godfather, it immediately becomes clear that Christopher is comically misguided. In the Godfather, Luca Brasi was murdered because he was caught trying to infiltrate a powerful rival organisation. Fish wrapped in his bullet-proof vest were then sent back to the Corleones in order to notify them that their plan had been foiled (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”). The “Luca Brasi situation” was a calculated and strategic move whereas Christopher’s situation amounts to a seemingly random, unauthorised killing. This sequence in The Sopranos uses this comparison for comedic effect and plays on the stereotype that all Italian Americans are mafioso and that all mafia behaviour is interchangeable. The symbolic language of the “Luca Brasi” scene is contrasted with explicit shots of a slumped, lifeless body. These shots are a source of macabre humour. The audience is invited to laugh at the contrast between the subtle, thoughtful nature of the Luca Brasi situation and the brash violence of Christopher’s own predicament. Through this comedic situation, The Sopranos critiques Christopher’s aspiration to be a godfather-esque gangster by showing his incompetence. Christopher’s misreading of the situation is further emphasised by his mistakenly referring to Luca Brasi as “Louis”. After Pussy says: “There are differences… from the Luca Brasi situation and this”, the dialogue pauses and the scene cuts to an immediate close up of Emil’s body falling to the side. This illustrates that part of the joke is that characters are willing to allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour, no matter how inappropriate. Therefore, Christopher is willing to refer to a scene from the Godfather that fails to account for the context of a situation without even consulting the knowledge of Big Pussy. This leads to a larger critique of the ways in which films like The Godfather are presented as a script for all Italian Americans to follow. Nevertheless, The Sopranos still has a role in perpetuating these same stereotypes. Tomasulo has argued that "despite its use of postclassical generic, narrative aesthetic devices, and its creation by an Italian American, The Sopranos relies heavily on demeaning tropes of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender" (206). This results in a perpetuation of negative stereotypes about working class Italian Americans that affirm old Hollywood clichés. While The Sopranos has tried to transcend this through complex characterisation, irony and universalisation, Tomasulo asserts that most audiences “take The Sopranos as straight - that is a raw unvarnished anthropology of Americans of Italian descent” (206). The origin of characters’ anti-social personalities seems to stem directly from their ethnicity and their being Italian appears to constitute an explanation for their behaviour. In his article Kocela discusses the complicated relationship that characters have with their white ethnicity. Through an application of Landsberg’s theory it is possible to understand how these ethnicities are initially formed and how they continue to circulate. In response to assimilation, characters in The Sopranos have turned to mass media to generate prosthetic memories of their ethnic heritage. These memories generally originate in classic gangster films. They are used by characters in The Sopranos to deny their whiteness and justify their criminality. The Sopranos itself comments on the complex ways that characters interpret gangster film stereotypes for both comedic and critical commentary. In the epilogue of her book, Landsberg asks: “How can we be sure the politics inspired by prosthetic memories are progressive and ethical?” Prosthetic memories generated by gangster texts are almost inherently problematic. Scholars have criticised the hyper-aggressive masculinity and regressive gender roles that are rampant throughout the genre (Larke-Walsh 226). For Tony and his friends, these problematic gender politics have helped justify their criminal lifestyle and valorised violence as part of ethnic performance. Similarly, these stereotypes are not always circulated critically and are at times perpetuated for audience enjoyment. AcknowledgmentI would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Michelle Phillipov for providing constructive feedback on earlier drafts. References“Commendatori.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. Tim Van Patten. HBO, 2000. DVD.Coppola, Francis, and Mario Puzo. The Godfather. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1972.“D-Girl.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Todd A. Kessler. Dir. Allen Coulter. HBO, 2000. DVD.D'Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. 563-690.Faucette, Brian. "Interrogations of Masculinity: Violence and the Retro-Gangster Cycle of the 60s." 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