This week Woody shares some news about a thing.
Hello. Firstly, I am aware the little italic sentence above this one could be more interesting. Also more informative. Apparently today is not a day in which my brain is going to be able to write abstracts. Shouldn’t be too much of a burden. Writing this post is the only thing I have to do today in which abstract-writing will be necessary. It’s not that I structure my days specifically to avoid writing abstracts, it’s just not something which pops up all that frequently when one’s plans are eating toast and writing jokes about one’s own beard. I’ve got distracted. Look, I’ll start again.
Hello. By Jove is going to do a thing! We do many things but this is a new sort of thing and it’s rather exciting. You see, in November By Jove will be giving a special preview performance of our version of The Bacchae at AMPRAW 2014. When I first looked at that acronym I thought it was a heavy metal gig or possibly something to do with wrestling. It is, in fact, the Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World. That’s right! By Jove’s going to Academia! This feels like a natural sort of place for By Jove to be. We apply academic rigour to all our work. Academia suffuses everything about us.
For example, this is our co-Artistic Director in his pyjamas
This year’s conference will be held from Monday 24th to Tuesday 25th November 2014 and is supported by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies, the A.G. Leventis Foundation, and the UCL Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies (JFIGS). The focus of this year’s AMPRAW will be ” the notion of authenticity in the reception of the ancient world”. So there will be papers on things like:
• How does the past become authentic? Can an act of reception—such as Freud’s reading of Oedipus—redefine the notion of authenticity?
• What are the politics of authenticity? What is invested in this term, and what is gained and/or lost when it is employed?
• How is the employment, or subversion, of the classical tradition used to validate or undermine modern work?
• How do claims of authenticity affect issues of accessibility, and do scholars have an obligation to mediate these notions?
There’ll also be a keynote lecture from Dr Nick Lowe, a roundtable, and us doing our theatrical thing and trying to keep By Jove co Artistic Director Mr. David Bullen from vibrating through the floor in barely-controlled scholarly excitement. I don’t know, dear reader, if you’re the sort of person interested in giving a paper but you can make a proposal if you like. AMPRAW is accepting proposals for 20-minute papers (with a following 10 minute discussion) on the above topics. Please send your title and abstract (no more than 300 words) by the 31st August 2014 to ampraw2014@gmail.com. When submitting abstracts please also include your name, affiliation and level of study. I don’t know if our blog will reach anyone who’d be interested but didn’t didn’t receive the initial call for papers, but I thought I’d include it on the off-chance. For up-to-date conference news and further details you can visit their website: ampraw2014.wordpress.com and get involved on twitter @AMPRAW2014.
I feel I should make clear that we here at By Jove HQ are not involved with the organisation of AMPRAW – it’s not our gig, we’re just doing a set – so I don’t want this to be viewed as a crude and mercernary advert. There will be crude and mercenary adverts for our own shows when they approach, but they will have more exclamation marks. The point of this blog post is in sharing our excitement at being included in what we regard as a big deal. We have always said that you can enjoy our shows simply as a bit of high-quality theatre if that is what you wish, that is our first and highest aim. This does not deny that we use academic modes of thinking in the creation of our shows and hope they do have something to recommend them on a scholarly level. It’s nice to see we’ve been doing something right and to get some recognition from our other group of friends. At the very least, being cited in an academic journal might help us flog a few more tickets.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
ADWoodward
