As part of the lecture series from the research group NEAM – Novel and Epic, Ancient and Modern, Karin Kukkonen will present a lecture on Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry’s Artamène ou Le Grand Cyrus.
01 October at 16h15 in GM 452.
Action, Storytelling and Conversation: Lessons in Agency from Cyrus
When Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry wrote Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649-1653), they drew on earlier versions of the Persian ruler Cyrus provided by Herodotus in his Histories and by Xenophon in his Cyropedia. In particular Xenophon presents Cyrus as an ideal character, a hero with perfect control over his narrative agency. The Scudérys place Cyrus at the centre of the narrative structure of the novel, but at the same time devise a series of embedded narratives in which less centralized and more networked modes of living and loving come to be developed and negotiated by the protagonists through storytelling and conversation. The lecture will trace how the Scudérys rewrite the story of Cyrus to serve a notion of narrative agency as networked, and how Madeleine de Scudéry reinvents the figure of Cyrus not as a ruler of subjects but as a ruler of human hearts.
See Heroes for information on the lecture series organised by Silvio Bär.