Genre, Occasion, and Choral Mimesis Revisited, with Special Reference to the “Newest Sappho”

Abstract

This essay is the thirdpart of a tripartite project.The first part, “Genre andOccasion,” was published in Mètis (1994–1995), and the second part, “Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: From Lesbos to Alexandria,” was published ten years later in Critical Inquiry (2004). Eleven years still later, I delivered the present essay, “Genre, Occasion, and Choral Mimesis Revisited,” as a keynote lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, on the occasion of the conference on which this volume is based. The subtitle of my essay refers to the “newest Sappho,” by which I mean the new fragments of Sappho as published in a 2016 book edited by Anton Bierl and André Lardinois, The Newest Sappho (P. Obbink and P. GC Inv. 105, frs. 1– 5). This book contains not only the new fragments of Sappho as edited by Dirk Obbinkbut also a set of chapters that comment extensively on those fragments. I focus here on two of those chapters in that book: (1) chapter 11 by Leslie Kurke, “Gendered Spheres and Mythic Models in Sappho’s Brothers Poem,” and (2) chapter 21 by myself, “A Poetics of Sisterly Affect in the Brothers Song and in Other Songs of Sappho.” Myessayhere, just likemykeynote lecture as indicated above, is dedicated to twopeople namedLeslie/Lesley. I startwith the first of the two,my friendLeslie Kurke. I focus on her interpretation of a song that is part of the new set of Sappho fragments that I already mentioned. In this Sappho fragment, containing a large part of a text now known as the Brothers Song, we read near the beginning that a female speaker, evidently the character of Sappho, is in the process of speaking to someone. In chapter 11 of the book that I also already mentioned,TheNewest Sappho, Kurke argues that this someone to whom Sappho is speaking is Sappho’s mother. This reading meshes with that of Dirk Obbink in