About the COLLAPSE project
COLLAPSE deals with questions of anonymous and collective authorship in antiquity and for the first time gives space to the unheard voices of Greek texts in the fields of poetry, religion and technology.
Authorship was frequently faked, forged, or anonymized. Because authorless texts resist the author-based gravitational structure of literary history, they continue to pose a challenge to scholars in the field and have often been marginalized. Up to now, the principle of anonymization and its particular interplay with onymization have not been investigated in Classical Philology and Greek Studies.
This problem forms the starting point for COLLAPSE. The project attempts to fundamentally change the way in which Greek literary history is written, and to rewrite it by focusing on the literature of the Imperial Period as a significant epoch for authorless text production. In times of opening up and re-perspectivizing the discipline of Classics, it is high time to rewrite literary history and to provide a methodological basis in order to restore those texts to their proper place in Greek literature.
Thus, COLLAPSE looks at the acts of (an)onymization and the interconnections between onymity (and its special case: pseudepigraphy) and anonymity. Following cross-contextual investigations the project also aims to draw connections between texts and contexts that scholars have often examined in isolation from one another, such as epic poetry, Early Christian literature and science writing.
Decades after Barthes’ Death of the Author (1968), the age of digitization continues to shake the notion of individual-original authorship. Collaborative networks give rise to the general impression that the human being only has relative autonomy in textual production. Digital technologies foster intersubjective modes of writing that depart from the expression of purely subjective experience through constant citation and modification. We are experiencing a digital Death of the Author 2.0, so to speak.
Thus, contrary to the assumptions of romantic genius aesthetics, which regarded works of art as creations of unrestrictedly autonomous artists, COLLAPSE problematizes authorship and regards it as a collaborative cultural practice of the Pre-Modern World, i.e. long before the birth of Romanticism’s solitary genius. Therefore, COLLAPSE takes up current developments, such as the popular fanfiction narratives on digital platforms, considering these approaches to canonical texts as diachronic forms of co-authorship. By addressing decentralized conceptions of authorship in the realm of fanfiction and rewriting for the first time, COLLAPSE touches on these digital modes of writing while transcending the narrower field of Classical Philology.
Imperial Greek literature in particular serves as a fertile ground to re-think (an)onymized text production. At the same time, it examines not only literary pseudepigraphy of ancient Greece, with a focus on the Imperial Period, but also early Christian and scientific anonymous text production. If all lines of research interact as expected, then looking at fanfictional and rewriting practices in anonymous and pseudepigraphical texts of the Imperial Period, including natural science and religious texts, may open up entirely new ways of writing literary history in future scholarship.