“Paraphrasis” Workshop

Paraphrasis. The Rhetorical Praxis of Hermeneutics

Friday, November 14^th 1:30 pm–7:30pm

Yale University, HQ 107

Organisers: Rüdiger Campe and Sina Dell’Anno

Speakers: Rüdiger Campe (Yale), Sina Dell’Anno (Basel/Yale), John Hamilton (Harvard), Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton), Jonathan Kramnick (Yale), Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale), Roland Spalinger (Zürich/Chapel Hill)

Abstract:

Paraphrase—the art of ‘speaking otherwise’—is fundamental to literary interpretation yet remains curiously untheorized. Though scholars routinely reformulate, expand, and re-voice the texts they study, paraphrase tends to recede into philological routine, its operations taken for granted or viewed with suspicion. This workshop brings paraphrase into focus as both a literary practice and a critical method, examining its historical transformations and conceptual complexities.

The workshop takes as its point of departure Quintilian’s account of paraphrase as rhetorical exercise (progymnasma). From there, it explores key moments in paraphrase’s history: Erasmus’s paraphrases of the New Testament; the role of paraphrase in shaping lyric and narrative forms from antiquity through the Renaissance; and Baumgarten’s eighteenth-century aesthetics, where paraphrase assumes both epistemic and ethical significance. The workshop concludes by turning to paraphrase as a methodological problem within modern and contemporary literary criticism, asking how this practice operates—often unacknowledged—in scholarly writing. In this way, the workshop brings paraphrase into focus as a practice that belongs equally to literature itself and to the discipline that studies it.

A reader will be circulated to registered participants in advance. Given the workshop’s intensive format, we hope participants will be able to attend throughout. Please RSVP to suzanne.al-labban@yale.edu and sina.dellanno@yale.edu by November 10 to register and receive materials.