‘What’s in a name? The politics of anonymity and pseudonymity: crossdisciplinary approaches’
Data evento
7 Maggio 2025
‘What’s in a name? The politics of anonymity and pseudonymity: cross-disciplinary approaches’ will address the width of theoretical and methodological perspectives on anonymous and pseudonymous authorship across literary and epigraphic discourses, and its shifting meaning in contemporary literary and performative art contexts. In particular, it will seek to tackle the following questions:
What are politics and poetics of anonymity/pseudonymity? How does anonymous/pseudonymous authorship challenge our understanding of poetic and political discourses in the ancient world? How does anonymity subvert critical notions of elite and popular, literary and sub-literary that dominate scholarly perspectives on ancient literary and epigraphic cultures?
This conference will also explore the gendered dimensions of anonymity, by interrogating the political assumptions at play in the still common practice of interpreting female writers as male authors in disguise.
A concluding performance ‘Taci, Anzi Parla! Performing Anonymity’ by the artist Eloise Fornieles will test out the paradoxical tensions between pseudonymity, anonymity and authorship in performative arts, promoting new ways into understanding the negotiations of (anonymous) authorship in contemporary discourses.