Mark Payne (Chicago) "The Choric Con-Sociality of Nonhuman Life: Schiller, Hölderlin, and Interpellation by Nature in Hellenistic Poetry"

Dr. Payne's paper forms part of a larger work in progress about the idea of chorality in human relationships with the natural world. How have human beings imagined themselves to be in choral relationships with particular natural entities and with the natural world as a whole, and what are the consequences of these relationships for the understanding of intra-human sociality? In this paper, Payne is concerned with the relationship between choral grounding and non-foundational versions of shared life, as both modes of attachment seek to enact themselves in an experience of the Greek landscape, and he looks for commonalities in the action of retrospective consciousness as it is modeled by Schiller and Hölderlin, on the one hand, and the Hellenistic Greeks’ recovery of the place of Nature in their primordial relations of sociality, on the other. Professor Robert Harrison (Stanford, French and Italian) will be responding.Mark Payne is Professor in the Department of Classics, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and the College at the University of Chicago. His first book, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His second book, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010 and received the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism.