1 Intertextuality in the Digital Age 1 Neil Coffee, J.-P. Koenig, Shakthi Poornima, Roelant Ossewaarde, Christopher Forstall, and Sarah Jacobson University at Buffalo, SUNY When does Vergil refer to the work of another author, and what does it mean? Variations of this question have been asked about a range classical works from the height of Alexandrian scholarship in the 3 rd century BCE to our own day. Formulations have changed, from ancient notions of imitation, emulation, and theft, to the modern emphasis on artistic repurposing and concerns with the ontological status of textual connections. 2 In classical studies, Latin poetry has been the subject of the most intensive investigation, but scholars of Greek poetry and of Greek and Latin prose have become increasingly interested in how authors reuse and refer to their predecessors and contemporaries. 3 Digital approaches now in development can accelerate this research and provide new large-scale perspectives on intertextuality. 4 These approaches are drawn from the discourse of digital humanities, and in particular from digital textual analysis. Humanities scholars have 1 We would like to thank the graduate student participants in the fall 2010 seminar on intertextuality at the University at Buffalo, Kevin Roth, Sarah Skelley, and Valerie Spiller, for their contributions to the testing process described below. We would also like to thank Neil Bernstein, Stephen Hinds, Damien Nelis, Paul Roche, and the anonymous reviewers of TAPA for suggestions that greatly improved this piece. 2 D’Ippolito 2000 reviews ancient conceptions of text reuse. Giangrande (e.g. Giangrande 1967) and his students have taken a lexical approach rooted in Alexandrian traditions that “as a rule, [does] not treat allusion as would a literary critic” (Farrell 1991: 14). Pasquali 1968 provided an influential exposition of allusion as artistic practice and is taken as a starting point by major works on Latin intertextuality such as Barchiesi 1984: 92, Conte 1986: 22-39, Thomas 1986: 171, Farrell 1991: 13, Wills 1996: 15 n. 2, and Edmunds 2001: 12. Hinds 1998: 20 n. 7 gives a précis of Pasquali’s Anglophone reception. Conte 1986: 24-25 notes that that the German scholars under whom Pasquali studied were already engaged with the expressive possibility of intertextuality. Important intertextual work was also done in the early modern period. So, e.g., De La Cerda 1617 became the foundation for later work on Vergilian intertextuality, such as Knauer 1964. 3 Some examples are the collection Schepens and Bollansée 2005 on Polybius’s use of his predecessors, Telo 2010 on Aristophanic intertextuality, Swift 2010 on the use of lyric features in classical Greek tragedy, and Levene 2010 on Livy’s reuse of passages from his predecessors. 4 We use the word “intertextuality” to denote the broadest range of relationships between texts. For an account of the differences in terminology (“allusion,” “intertextuality,” “reference”) used by scholars of Latin literature, see Farrell 2005, esp. p. 98 n. 2. We discuss definitions further in our concluding section.