Irene Berti

Social Texts: How to Account for the Cultural Work of Carrier Media

This essay develops a perspective from the field of American Studies, which on the surface of things could hardly be more distant from the historical focus of this volume. Americanists hardly venture into the premodern period, coterminous as the idea of “America” is with the end of this historiographical era. Neither do they concern themselves with the geographical areas under investigation here. Yet the interdisciplinary focus of the Heidelberg research center “Material Text Cultures” strikes a chord with my field, foremost perhaps in its strategic alignment of materiality with cultural studies. In itself, American Studies has an interesting position vis-à-vis the idea of “culture”. A relative latecomer to the ensemble of modern language studies and philologies, it distinguished itself strategically from its paramount predecessor English by decentering literature and by poaching on various other disciplines such as sociology and history in order to take on the expansive form of American Cultural Studies now taught in institutions worldwide. Alongside the still vital role of literature in this scheme, the field saw the emergence of visual culture, popular culture, media history, film and television studies, and music as central nodes of research. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore the function of objects within processes of cultural evolution, leading to a surging amount of studies on what is now referred to as American material culture. By and large, however, such studies understand material culture as encompassing tools, objects collected in museums and archives, memory sites, as well as the materials of everyday existence.1 Literature, then, figures mainly as an archive of fictional records about material culture, as in Bill Brown’s seminal work on thing theory and the role of objects in fiction.2 Yet, in a very basal form literature itself has always been a form of material culture, reliant on the circulation of raw materials and artifacts. Modern, typographic cultures need material media as much as pre-modern, non-typographic ones. Here, then, fields as disparate as Classics, archaeology, mediaeval studies and modern literary studies find a common research perspective: to unearth, recover, analyze, and interpret the traces and records of lives lived in the past and to build upon these artifacts our accounts of how cultures communicated about themselves and about each other 10, 100, or 1,000 years ago. For the time being, I will attempt to downplay the vast historical gap that divides these fields and focus on some concrete but also some very abstract connecting lines between the classical period, the Middle Ages and the modern Anglo-American scene.

Campaigning for Votes in Ancient Pompeii: Contextualizing Electoral Programmata

Analyzing inscriptions in their spatial contexts has become a very welcome trend in Classics in recent years. The contents of inscriptions have been studied and discussed in great detail, but little attention has been paid to the question what the find context could mean for the interpretation of the text and its significance.1 However, it sometimes still seems that the texts themselves are more interesting to scholars than their contextualization. Is it enough for instance, to take one group of inscriptions defined by their content and place them on a map of a site? Does this add a genuine new level of context into the interpretation? What about all the other inscriptions found at the site? Where are they located compared to this particular group? Are different kinds of texts commonly found in similar places? What are the exact locations where the inscriptions were placed? A broader approach to contextualization is necessary if the texts are to be understood in their contexts. Distribution of a single group of texts needs to be compared to distributions of others and the detailed elements of the individual archaeological context need to be taken into consideration. It is understandable why this kind of work is still quite rare: there are hardly any easily usable data sets available and finding the relevant data for a variety of analytical elements requires a lot of time and effort. The main aim of the project “Inscribed Texts in their Spatial Contexts in Roman Italy”2 was to combine philological and archaeological expertise in order to analyze both the content of the texts and the archaeology of their contexts. Texts painted, scratched or written with coal or chalk on the façades of the city blocks of Pompeii were one of the main topics. The main question was why the texts were written where they were found. The hypothesis was that these wall inscriptions were related to places where people moved or hung out for periods of time. The main task was to place the