Major
Classical Languages
Anticipated Graduation Year
2024
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
My case studies derive from two places of cultural contact—Rome and Vietnam—when writing practices interact with the identities of individual writers. Four case studies of inscribed objects from 7th-4th centuries BCE trace the development of the Latin script in Italy, and two manuscripts from 17th century CE Vietnam show how chữ Quốc ngữ—the Latin script that Jesuit colonizers adapted for the Vietnamese language—was negotiated by foreign missionaries and Vietnamese converts.
I consider identity a phenomenon which is personal, social, and cultural (Astoreca 2021b); I use a cultural approach to studying writing, where writing is defined as “an element of social practice within a given cultural environment” (Boyes et al. 2021). Writing, as a performative act (Ragazzoli et al. 2018), must be approached on its own terms.
Across these wide-ranging texts, I identified three common strands: use of writing as a response to historical context, use of writing to evoke orality, and use of writing for commemoration. For example, both the letter and the amphora contain first-person signatures which would be read aloud, necessarily animating them.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Laura Gawlinski, Dr. Anne Wingenter, Dr. Nguyen Luu Bao Doan, Dr. Mine Cinar
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Inscribing Identity: The Development of the Latin Script in Ancient Rome and Early Modern Vietnam
My case studies derive from two places of cultural contact—Rome and Vietnam—when writing practices interact with the identities of individual writers. Four case studies of inscribed objects from 7th-4th centuries BCE trace the development of the Latin script in Italy, and two manuscripts from 17th century CE Vietnam show how chữ Quốc ngữ—the Latin script that Jesuit colonizers adapted for the Vietnamese language—was negotiated by foreign missionaries and Vietnamese converts.
I consider identity a phenomenon which is personal, social, and cultural (Astoreca 2021b); I use a cultural approach to studying writing, where writing is defined as “an element of social practice within a given cultural environment” (Boyes et al. 2021). Writing, as a performative act (Ragazzoli et al. 2018), must be approached on its own terms.
Across these wide-ranging texts, I identified three common strands: use of writing as a response to historical context, use of writing to evoke orality, and use of writing for commemoration. For example, both the letter and the amphora contain first-person signatures which would be read aloud, necessarily animating them.