A democratic turn? Uncovering and understanding referencing patterns to Greco-Roman canonicity in 20th-century public discourse

Reference cultures typically provide other cultures with models, ideas or examples, and have been formed through public discourse over different generations. This PhD project will uncover the social use of Greco-Roman antiquity as a reference culture in 20th-century public discourse, and takes it to a new level. It will use reference mining as a tool to develop a longitudinal overview, for the first time reconstructing ancient canon formation as negotiated through journalistic writings in the long 20th century. Referencing antiquity implies that the target audience is expected to be familiar with the reference or at least recognizes its function (e.g. ‘Trump, modern Nero, watched the Capitol sacked from a White House dining room’). Collecting and categorizing these references in a corpus of digitized collections (esp. Gallica) creates an instrument by which the PhD will assess existing hypotheses on canon formation and the social use of canon and formulate a new hypothesis on the robustness of ancient canonicity. Europe’s longstanding relation with classicism makes it an ideal testing ground for questions on cultural change. Its turbulent history of colonialism and war occupation will be the subject of a test case to deploy the new research tool combined with quantitative and qualitative analysis to better understand the relation between cultural change and ancient canonicity.