COLLOQUIUM: Marco Formisano, Ghent, "Seeing double: The contemporary and the immemorial in Claudian and Colluthus"

What is the contemporary? According to Giorgio Agamben, it is the untimely and it consists of a disconnection and out-of-jointness. Contemporariness always has a strong connection to the mythical and the immemorial. In this paper I explore two late antique texts, Claudian’s de raptu Proserpinae and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen (harpage Helenes) by comparing their individual ways of escaping their own specific context in order to establish a connection with the primordial, mythical and immemorial past, located outside of the literary tradition.​