A significant trend in the cognitively inflected narratology of the past few decades has been a focus on ways in which narrative presentation can correspond to or deviate from the ways in which our cognitive-affective systems structure our everyday experience of the world — cf.
Herman’s emphasis on “what it’s like” (e.g. 2009, 2013), or the “cognitive realism” of Troscianko (2014). Within this larger movement, Hogan has offered the fullest attempts (e.g. 2011b, a, 2020) to formulate a narratology which properly accounts for the ways that narrative is
structured by and reflective of our emotional engagements with the world.
The aim of this paper's contribution is to build on exploratory efforts to apply Hogan’s ‘affective narratology’ to classical texts, with a particular focus on its use for historical narratives. Professor van Emde Boas's test case will be Thucydides’ description of the night-time Athenian assault on Epipolae and its disastrous outcome (7.42-45). Recent commentaries offer interestingly contrasting views of the narrative here: Pelling (2022 ad loc.) argues that the “tumult of conflicting impressions” in the attack “is stylistically mirrored and conveyed” by the narrative; Hornblower (2009: 36), by contrast, detects a “special kind of stylistic enactment” in the scene which “imposes order on chaos”.
Using an affective-narratological approach, Professor van Emde Boas will assess these alternatives and seek a more fine-grained appreciation of the effects at work. The Epipolae scene is also one in which Thucydides comments explicitly, and with some frustration, on his source-gathering practice as a historian (the battle’s disorder rendered it “not easy to get from one side or the other any detailed account of the affair,” 7.44.1). The narrative thus variously implicates the emotions of historian-narrator, characters, and readers; an affective-narratological approach may help to tease these apart, with potential wider implications for an affective narratology of historical narrative.