MAGALI ANNÉE

Magali Année

Nationality: French

Place and Date of Birth: Versailles, Decembre 12th, 1981

 

 

Holder of the Agrégation de Grammaire and of a PhD in Greek Classical Studies defended at Paris Sorbonne University – Paris IV, Magali Année has been awarded a triple qualification as Maître de Conférences (Assistant Professor) in the following sections of the CNU (National Council of Universities): 17-Philosophy; 8-Ancient Languages and Literature; 7-Language Sciences. She is currently conducting her research as an Associate Member of the laboratory Savoirs, Textes, Langage (CNRS-UMR 8163 – University of Lille).

Trained in Greek philology and linguistics in the French tradition that keeps going from Saussure’s work through Meillet, Chantraine, Benveniste, and their current successors, she has been able to take advantage, at the same time, of the indispensable issues of Greek anthropology as it is formulated in the spirit of the “School of Paris”. While leading her thesis on the archaic elegies of Tyrtaeus and Kallinos, at the bend of scientific discussion, she happened to delve into the details of the text of Parmenides’ fragments. From there, her approach grew independent in a way that made it possible to gain also from the principles of the hermeneutical philology of someone like Jean Bollack and to reach the originality that founds her entire research project.

 

This project aims principally at comprehending the Cratylean conception that the Greeks, up to Plato (and to a certain extent until Aristotle) had of their own language in an attempt to show the “infra-linguistic” implications of this conception on the mechanism of meaning. As it is attested in Plato’s Cratylus, Greeks proved to feel their language fundamentally “sonic” (i.e. beyond any inappropriate oral/literate dichotomy), as made of phonic-syllabic units endowed with a more or less pregnant morpho-semantic value.

It is a question of using all our technical knowledge about Greek language (linguistic, rhythmic, dialectological, historical, pragmatic, anthropological, philosophical, etc.), in order to highlight within Greek texts – below the conventional meaning of words, at the level of syllabic units and their morphology – characters which are unique to an ever both sonic and cultural Greek language, and that explain the power of performance effects on listeners. By promoting a new type of philology (she proposes to call “phonico-pragmatic”), which, according Saussure’s wish, does not stick slavishly to the written language and forgets the living language, she hopes to open up a novel access to the poetic and learned “dictions” of the archaic and classical time that brings to light the power of communication and meaning that was inherent to them.