An East African myth recounting the first cattle raid provides the starting point for the author to consider whether his earlier attempt to treat myth as "ideology in narrative form" is adequate, or whether a view of the genre as cultural knowledge (with Marshall Sahlins) or self-realizing discourse (with Michel Foucault) might be preferable. Two attempts to deploy variants of American creation myth in the contemporary political climate also figure in the discussion.

Am 18. Mai 2022 wird Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London, & Simon Fraser University) einen Gastvortrag zum Thema "Ideas Without Words. Furio Jesi and the Culture of the Right" halten. Der Vortrag findet als virtuelle Veranstaltung über Zoom statt. Wenn Sie Interesse haben, senden Sie eine E-Mail an  komparatistikuni-koeln.de, um den Link zu erhalten. Alle Interessierten sind herzlich willkommen!

Shortly before his untimely death, the Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi (1941-1980) published a nuanced, trenchant and controversial anatomy of right-wing thought, Cultura di destra (1978), cutting across its diverse reactionary, modernist, traditionalist and racist formations. Jesi excavated the culture of the right’s defining reliance on a mythological machine that produces the past as “a kind of homogenised mush that can be moulded at will,” and which allows one to declare that “there exist indisputable values, indicated by capitalised words” - Family, Honour, Work, Tradition, Civilisation, and last but not least, Culture. This talk will explore Jesi’s engagement with the likes of Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Oswald Spengler, while also touching on the relation between this diagnostic work and Jesi’s broader analysis of the nexus between literature, myth and politics, with particular reference to his interrogation of the works of the Italian novelist, poet and intellectual Cesare Pavese. Finally, we will ask what Jesi’s method can bring to a critical theory of the contemporary recombinant right - or, to borrow Spengler’s formula, so crucial to Jesi’s investigation, what are today’s “ideas without words”?

Am 20. Januar 2022 findet ein Workshop zu aktuellen Forschungsprojekten des Cologne Mythological Network statt. Das Programm wird noch bekannt gegeben. Alle interessierten Studierenden und Doktorand*innen sind herzlich eingeladen. Der Zoom-Link wird nach Anmeldung an komparatistik@uni-koeln.de verschickt.

Am 16. Dezember 2021 wird Greta Hawes (Harvard CHS) einen Gastvortrag zum Thema "Ancient Greek Myth Without Myth-Tellers" halten. Der Vortrag findet als virtuelle Veranstaltung über Zoom statt. Wenn Sie Interesse haben, senden Sie eine E-Mail an  , um den Link zu erhalten. Alle Interessierten sind herzlich willkommen!

Her talk will focus on the question: What happens to stories when the cities they belong to are destroyed or abandoned? The paper will answer this question using the example of Greek myth in the 2nd century AD, and with the help of a new digital model for ancient storytelling, MANTO. It will show that, quite apart from the quantitative loss of detail, we find intriguing qualitative shifts how stories attached to ruined cities. These shifts allow us to build up a new understanding of how other cultural infrastructures can compensate for the absence of a local storytelling population.

Dr. Greta Hawes is a Research Associate at Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies. She specializes in the study of Greek myth, particularly the examination of ancient contexts for storytelling, the Greeks' assessment of mythic phenomena in their own culture, and the modes of interpretation to which these gave rise.

Prof. José Luis García Ramón (UCSC Milan) wird am 18. November 2021 ab 17:45 Uhr einen Gastvortrag mit dem Titel "On God Names in Ancient Greece and Italy: Linguistics, Philology, Comparative Reconstruction" halten. Alle interessierten Studierenden sind herzlich eingeladen. Die Veranstaltung wird online stattfinden. Bei Interesse können Sie sich mit einer kurzen E-Mail an  anmelden - und erhalten dann den Zoom-Link zur Veranstaltung.

The talk will focus on a choice of divine names and epithets used to invoke gods in inscriptions or literary texts, which reveal precious information about the characteristics of the different divine beings and mythological characters and their representations by Greeks and Romans. Cultic and literary epithets of gods reflect different aspects of their divine personality and can show astonishing characteristics, which are highly instructive about their powers. The talk will make the case for the importance of a threefold approach involving Linguistics, Philology, and Comparative Reconstruction for the interpretation of divine onomastics.

Prof. José Luis García Ramón currently teaches at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan), and was previously Professor of Historical Comparative Linguistics at the University of Cologne (until 2015) and Professor of Greek Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (until 1995). Among his favorite research topics are Indo-European Reconstruction, Morphosyntax, Etymology, Onomastics, and Poetics, with special focus on Greek, Latin and Italic, Indo-Iranian, and Anatolian.

Am 24.02.2021 um 16:30 Uhr wird Carlotta Santini einen Vortrag zum Thema "The 19th-century discovery of the African myth of 'Gassire’s Lute'" halten.

• Abstract: The talk will present a discussion of „Gassire’s Lute”, an African epic poem edited by late 19th / early 20th century German ethnologist Leo Frobenius in his Atlantis collection. Carlotta Santini will analyze the multiple semantic stratifications of the poem, whose authenticity is more than controversial, bringing it back to the historical and cultural context of the late nineteenth century of the rediscovery and reconstruction of national epics.

• Info zur Person: Carlotta Santini is Chargée de Recherche in Paris (CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure) and Marie Curie fellow at Copenhagen University's Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies. She works on the history of ideas and intellectual history following a strongly transdisciplinary approach, ranging from classical studies to anthropology, from philosophy to literature, to history and art history, and her Marie Curie project in Copenhagen is called "Making national identity. The construction of Germanic Mythology in the 19th century".

Gastvortrag

02.12.2020 | 18:00 Uhr über Zoom 

Im Rahmen des Cologne Mythological Network wird Erika Weiberg (Duke University) einen Gastvortrag halten. 

The Writing on the Mind:

Deianeira’s Trauma in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis

Almost every Greek tragedy features a wound. Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes are among the most memorable, but there are many other varieties: combat wounds, animal bites, and even emotional wounds. This last type of trauma dominates the events of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, which dramatizes the connection between Deianeira’s emotional pain and the physical pain of her husband, Heracles. Over the course of the play, Deianeira narrates the chronic pain and anxiety she feels during Heracles’ cyclical absences, as well as a past incident of sexual violence that continues to affect her even many years later. Drawing on modern trauma research, this talk argues that Sophocles’ Women of Trachis depicts the struggle of putting words to these types of emotional wounds.

Colloquium im WS 19/20

Ancient Myths in Modern Art:

Comparative Perspectives on Micro and Macro Structures

Donnerstags 17:45 - 19:15 Uhr 
Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24, Raum 3.03

Anna Bonifazi/Joachim Harst

Ancient myths are omnipresent in 20th and 21st century literature and art. In this colloquium scholars from comparative literature and linguistics as well as from related disciplines will present their research on the subject. Both myths in ancient cultures and the history of their reception in the arts will be addressed. In addition to the detailed analysis of individual myths (e.g. the hero's return home), the comparative examination of mythical figures and their reception (e.g. Orpheus) as well as the macrostructural view of Indo-European mythology will be discussed. Students can take this opportunity to present and discuss their own research projects within the (broad) framework of myth reception.