Moore, Christopher. Review of William Wians, ed. LOGOS AND MUTHOS. BMCR (March 2010).

Wians, William, ed. Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. This book's cover wonders whether literature and philosophy "are in fact two rival forms of discourse mutually opposed to one another." But really its dozen essays take on less programmatic issues. Each submits an early Greek text--frequently the Homeric epics or the Agamemnon, but also archaic poetry and classical tragedy--to the sort of careful reading such texts, by themselves, occasion. As a loosely coordinated collection of readings, a couple of which I would recommend to others, this collection proves satisfactory. As an argument about the position of philosophy in works outside the philosophical canon, it proves less so. The book, according to its editor, means to "explore philosophical dimensions of literary authors." This goal gets haphazardly glossed across the first several pages as, e.g., (i) to "consider philosophical issues and ideas as they arise from or can be applied to literary... texts"; (ii) to "challenge [the] assumption ... that literary texts are somehow lacking when measured against standards of philosophical reasoning and argument"; or (iii) to "demonstrate that the poets... exhibit a high degree of critical self-awareness and reflection on issues more typically associated with ancient philosophers" (1-2). The last of these glosses best reflects the success of the book: the poets come out looking highly well-worth reading by people concerned about their own self-knowledge and all those topics such a concern could entail. The second gloss, about the relative rigor of argument, is never addressed, and struck me as almost by definition impossible (if a philosophical text is called so just because of its preponderance of explicit argument). The first gloss, with no attention to what would make an "issue" philosophical, as opposed simply to what reasonable people would think about, struck me as vacuous. By leaving "philosophy" undefined, or, at best, by treating it as claiming things about knowledge, or identity, or the soul, or the four elements, the book forewent a chance, I think, to ask as seriously as possible what role the appreciation of literature could have played in a classical Greek philosophical life. Assume, for instance, that philosophy is an activity that involves bringing ourselves to have only those commitments (i.e., about truth and value) for which we can find good reasons to maintain. Or assume that it's a practice meant to achieve self-knowledge, whatever self-knowledge might be. From either of those perspectives, the question about the philosophicality of a text would be a question about how that text could contribute to living rationally or to developing self-recognition. Homer's or Aeschylus's occupation with problems of ignorance or fate or virtue could then be judged perspicuous or not, mature or not, persuasive or not, rigorous or not, from some common viewpoint. The analysis of will this text give me a productive site for philosophizing? seems to me often more fruitful (as, in part, the question is answered mainly by trying) than does this text have a high philosophical quotient? In most of the cases developed in this book, the answer to the first question is "yes," and to the second question, so it seems to me, is "I'm still not quite sure what's being asked." . . . Read the whole review here: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-03-38.html. (Thanks for the tip to Ed Brandon.)

Moore. Christopher. Review of Simon Goldhill, ed. THE END OF DIALOGUE IN ANTIQUITY. BMCR (February 2010).

Goldhill, Simon, ed. The End of Dialogue in Antiquity. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. This collection seeks to explain why dialogue--a written genre--apparently lost popularity during the Christian era. Nearly all the papers are really interesting. The book's scope--from Thucydides and Plato, to Cicero and late sympotic literature, to the rabbinic tales and the Church Fathers--is wondrous. Contrary to the claims of its précis and introduction, though, as revisions from a 2006 University of Cambridge conference, it is hardly a "general and systematic study"; it has instead the vices, and the virtues, of a broad-ranging conversation. I read this work of history as being concerned with two questions: (1) What reasons do we have for bringing together certain literary works as instances, either central or marginal, of "dialogue form"? and (2) What motivated authors to write the works of this genre, and what social trends--especially openness to political or religious dialogue--enabled such writing? The strength of this collection is in bringing together lots of discussion of works we might or might not want to call instances of "dialogue form" and lots of authors whose motivation to write dialogues is worth serious attention. The weakness is that it rarely presents the questions sharply or consistently enough for the reader to assemble some form of answer. . . . (Thanks to Ed Brandon for the link.) Read the rest here: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-02-25.html.

Smith, Stephen: "The Poetry of Persuasion: Early Literary Theory and Its Advice to Legal Writers."

Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors 6 (2009). Abstract: This article will address the possibility and necessity of aesthetic pleasure as a part of persuasive endeavors. It will do so through a review of early literary theorists’ statements about what poetry does artistically, and how it does it. It will seek insight from these theorists by extracting from their writings those precepts that seem most useful to the legal writer. This is a selective and non-comprehensive review of the work of a variety of early theorists. It would be impossible to extract from each writer every “helpful hint” he might provide. Moreover, in assembling a variety of suggestions and commands from writers over the centuries, this article does not presume to be mining new concepts in writing practice. The ideas are not necessarily unfamiliar ones, but come from early, perhaps original sources.The article also attempts to go from these past exhortations to some sort of present-day pertinence. How can the advice be employed in a legal writer’s practice? While the aphorisms of early theorists are invaluable, situating them in practical context may be helpful. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1434737.

Fratantuono, Lee. Review of James Morwood's VIRGIL, A POET IN AUGUSTAN ROME. BMCR January 10, 2009.

Morwood, James. Virgil, a Poet in Augustan Rome. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

Morwood's (hereafter M.) volume in the Cambridge Greece and Rome: Texts and Contexts series is one of the latest in the unabating stream of books on Virgil's verse, this time apparently aimed at an audience that will not be reading the poet's three works in toto anytime soon. For M.'s book provides a survey of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, taking us though each work with prose translations of selected parts, short summaries of the many omitted sections, brief annotation (and illustration) relevant to the excerpted lines, and numerous discussion questions to stimulate classroom exchange. Rather than being a guide to Virgil's opera, M.'s book is a substitute for reading the originals. Something of a throwback to late antiquity, this volume embodies a disturbing move to epitomize the work of masters. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090110.html.

Too, Yun Lee. Review of Tim Whitmarsh's ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE. BMCR (January 2009).

Whitmarsh, Tim. Ancient Greek Literature. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. I suggest that the book is indeed cutting edge or on the forefront of Greek literature studies and, as such, it is representative of the classics tripos at Cambridge University (where incidentally TW and I both studied and had research fellowships in the 1990s). In his preface TW denies a chronological structure to his work in favour of themes and topics that cluster around literary texts, albeit chapters 1 to 9 proceed rather chronologically around the various genres. This is what I describe as the diachronic approach in the book. Chapters 10 to 13 read Greek literature synchronically, ordering the discussion around very current topics that seek to demonstrate that the literature we are calling 'Greek' was always in contest in a way that we might find very relevant and engaging today. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090133.html.

Gotschall, Jonathan. "Hidden Histories." BOSTON GLOBE September 28, 2008.

Reconstructing a prehistoric world from literary sources is rife with complications. But there are aspects of life in the Homeric era upon which most scholars agree. Homer paints a coherent picture of Greek attitudes, ideology, customs, manners, and mores that is consistent with the 8th century archeological record, and holds together based on anthropological knowledge about societies at similar levels of cultural development. For instance, we can trust that the Greeks' political organization was loose but not chaotic - probably organized at the level of chiefdoms, not kingdoms or city-states. In the epics we can see the workings of an agrarian economy; we can see what animals they raised and what crops, how they mixed their wine, worshipped their gods, and treated their slaves and women. We can tell that theirs was a warlike world, with high rates of conflict within and between communities. This violence, in fact, opens an important window onto that world. Patterns of violence in Homer are intriguingly consistent with societies on the anthropological record known to have suffered from acute shortages of women. While Homeric men did not take multiple wives, they hoarded and guarded slave women who they treated as their sexual property. These women were mainly captured in raids of neighboring towns, and they appear frequently in Homer. In the poems, Odysseus is mentioned as having 50 slave women, and it is slave women who bear most of King Priam's 62 children. For every slave woman working a rich man's loom and sharing his bed, some less fortunate or formidable man lacks a wife. In pre-state societies around the world - from the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin to the tribes of highland New Guinea to the Inuit of the Arctic - a scarcity of women almost invariably triggers pitched competition among men, not only directly over women, but also over the wealth and social status needed to win them. This is exactly what we find in Homer. Homeric men fight over many different things, but virtually all of the major disputes center on rights to women - not only the famous conflict over Helen, but also over the slave girls Briseis and Chryseis, Odysseus's wife Penelope, and all the nameless women of common Trojan men. As the old counselor Nestor shouts to the Greek hosts, "Don't anyone hurry to return homeward until after he has lain down alongside a wife of some Trojan!" . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/09/28/hidden_histories/?page=full.

CFP: "Global Language, Local Cultures," Annual Meeting, American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, March 26-29, 2009.

From the early spreading of languages such as Greek, Chinese, Latin, and Arabic across broad regions to the present age of globalization, local literary cultures have long had to interact with hegemonic languages and literatures of foreign origin. As Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett argued in his book Comparative Literature as early as 1886, world literature first arose in antiquity long before the rise of the individual national literatures. The theme of “Global languages, local cultures” can offer avenues into many lines of inquiry: explorations of “minor literatures”; regionalism and transregional relations; empires and postcolonial situations; interactions of literature with religious and philosophical traditions; classical literatures and modern offshoots or responses; “standard” languages, creoles, and vernaculars; movements of genres into new cultural spaces; translation theory and practice; relations of literature, music, film, and other arts. The ACLA’s annual conferences have a unique structure in which most papers are grouped into 9-12 person seminars that meet two hours per day, for the three days of the conference, in order to foster discussion. Some 8-person seminars meet the first two days of the conference. Previous conference programs that show this structure are available at the ACLA website. The conference will also include plenary sessions, workshops, a business meeting, a banquet, and other events on and off the Harvard campus. We invite proposals for seminars as well as individual paper proposals. Seminar Proposal Deadline: September 15, 2008 Paper Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2008 Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.acla.org/acla2009/.

Henderson, John. "Review of Lorna Hardwick, et al. BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CLASSICAL RECEPTIONS." BMCR (August 2008).

Hardwick, Lorna, and Christopher Stray, eds. Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Contents: Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray. 'Introduction: Making Connections': 1-9 Ch. 1. Felix Budelmann and Johannes Haubold, 'Reception and Tradition': 13-25 Ch. 2. Barbara Graziosi, 'The Ancient Reception of Homer': 26-37 Ch. 3. Chris Emlyn-Jones, 'Poets on Socrates' Stage: Plato's Reception of Dramatic Art': 38-49 Ch. 4. Thomas Harrison, '"Respectable in its ruins": Achaemenid Persia, Ancient and Modern': 50-61 Ch. 5. Ruth Webb, 'Basil of Caesarea and Greek Tragedy': 62-71 Ch. 6. Seth L. Schein, '"Our Debt to Greece and Rome": Canons, Class and Ideology': 75-85 Ch. 7. David W. Bebbington, 'Gladstone on the Classics': 86-97 Ch. 8. Emily Greenwood, 'Between Colonialism and Independence: Eric Williams and the Uses of Classics in Trinidad in the 1950s and 1960s': 98-112 Ch. 9. Stephen Harrison, 'Virgilian Contexts': 113-26 Ch. 10. David Hopkins, 'Colonization, Closure or Creative Dialogue?: The Case of Pope's Iliad ': 129-40 Ch. 11. Ahmed Etman, 'Translation at the Intersection of Traditions: The Arab Reception of the Classics': 141-52 Ch. 12. J. Michael Walton, '"Enough Give in It": Translating the Classical Play': 153-67 Ch. 13. James Robson, 'Lost in Translation? The Problem of (Aristophanic) Humour': 168-82 Ch. 14. Cashman Kerr Prince, '"Making It New": André Gide's Rewriting of Myth': 185-94 Ch. 15. Vanda Zajko, '"What Difference Was Made?": Feminist Models of Reception': 195-206 Ch. 16. Miriam Leonard, 'History and Theory: Moses and Monotheism and the Historiography of the Repressed': 207-18 Ch. 17. Pantelis Michelakis, 'Performance Reception: Canonization and Periodization': 219-28 Ch. 18. Michael Ewans, 'Iphigénie en Tauride and Elektra: "Apolline" and "Dionysiac" Receptions of Greek Tragedy into Opera': 231-26 Ch. 19. Fiona Macintosh, 'Performance Histories': 247-58 Ch. 20. Angeliki Varakis, '"Body and Mask" in Performances of Classical Drama on the Modern Stage': 259-73 Ch. 21. Freddy Decreus, 'The Nomadic Theatre of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio: A Case of Postdramatic Reworking of the Classical Tragedy': 274-86 Ch. 22. Nurit Yaari, 'Aristophanes between Israelis and Palestinians': 287-300 Ch. 23. Joanna Paul, 'Working with Film: Theories and Methodologies': 303-14 Ch. 24. Hanna M. Roisman, 'The Odyssey from Homer to NBC: The Cyclops and the Gods': 315-26 Ch. 25. Marianne McDonald, 'A New Hope: Film as a Teaching Tool for the Classics': 327-41 Ch. 26. Catharine Edwards, 'Possessing Rome: The Politics of Ruins in Roma capitale': 345-59 Ch. 27. Gonda van Steen, '"You unleash the tempest of tragedy": The 1903 Athenian Production of Aeschylus' Oresteia': 360-72 Ch. 28. Betine van Zyl Smit, 'Multicultural Reception: Greek Drama in South Africa in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-first centuries': 373-85 Ch. 29. Edith Hall, 'Putting the Class into Classical Reception': 386-97 Ch. 30. Gregson Davis, 'Reframing the Homeric: Images of the Odyssey in the Art of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden': 401-14 Ch. 31. Sarah Annes Brown, '"Plato's Stepchildren": SF and the Classics': 415-27 Ch. 32. Rosalind Hursthouse, 'Aristotle's Ethics, Old and New': 428-39 Ch. 33. Bryan E. Burns, 'Classicizing Bodies in the Male Photographic Tradition': 440-51 Ch. 34. Elizabeth Vandiver, 'Homer in British World War One Poetry': 452-65 Ch. 35. James I. Porter, 'Reception Studies: Future Prospects': 469-81

Read the review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/08/20080838.html.

Mulligan, Bret, et al. "Review of J. H. D. Scourfield, ed. TEXTS AND CULTURE IN LATE ANTIQUITY." BMCR (August 2008).

Scourfield, J. H. D., ed. Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007.

This is an ambitious collection that merits consideration not only by scholars who specialize in the diverse authors and topics discussed therein, but also by those interested in reception and late antique intellectual culture generally. Introducing the volume, its adept editor J. H. D. Scourfield laments that the "balkanization" of the study of the intellectual culture in late Antiquity has led to an academic climate in which "classical/classicizing, philosophical, and patristic literature may pay each other visits, but still inhabit essentially different territory" (vii). This collection, then, represents an attempt to encourage a move away from this scholarly fragmentation towards "a view of the textual world of late Antiquity which sees it as a single land" (vii). Uniting these sundry essays--which span geography, grammarians, classicizing occasional poetry, Christian cento and paraphrase literature, Neoplatonism, Christian views of the classical tradition, and monasticism--is a common engagement with "texts of special authority", in particular Homer, Virgil, Plato, and the Bible (vii). The topical and methodological diversity typical of an edited volume thus becomes one of the advantages of this collection, which, if not panoptic, nevertheless illustrates the impressive range of reception opportunities available to writers in late Antiquity and provides a sample of the approaches scholars are taking to the field. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-17.html.

Friedman, Rachel D. "Review of Lorna Hardwick, et al., eds. CLASSICS IN POST-COLONIAL WORLDS." BMCR (August 2008).

Hardwick, Lorna, and Carol Gillespie, eds. Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds: Classical Presences. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

I take it as a sign of the health of our discipline that it seems no longer possible to dismiss reception studies, or, what used to be called the 'Classical Tradition,' as a minor or even marginal subfield of the discipline of classics. Classicists, slowly catching up with members of other academic fields, have begun realizing that it is no longer sufficient to devote ourselves to the recovery of some positivist philological truth while ignoring the historical, social, and political circumstances that have conditioned the reading of these ancient texts from which these so-called truths have been recovered. Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, a collection of nineteen papers originally presented at a conference in 2004 at the Open University and published in the Oxford Classical Presences series, is an important indication of the newly prominent place of reception studies in the field of classics and also an interesting barometer of the current state of such studies. It is co-edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie. Hardwick has been an important pioneer in the field and has, in numerous essays and books, laid the groundwork for what these new reception studies might look like. Carol Gillespie is the Project Officer of the Classical Receptions Project at the Open University, of which Hardwick is Director, though unfortunately there is no biographical notice for Gillespie in the list of contributors. This volume takes its place among other recently published collections such as the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions (edited by Hardwick and Christopher Stray), and Classics and the Use of Reception (edited by Charles Martindale), all of which perform the important function of exposing scholars to some of the new directions in which the field of classics is expanding. What distinguishes this volume from the others is its exclusive focus on the role of classics in 'post-colonial worlds.' Hardwick explains in her introduction (3) that the terms 'colonial' and 'postcolonial' were, for the purposes of the conference on which this collection is based, "used in their widest sense to include domination and emancipation through educational, ideological, cultural economic means, as well as through physical force." In its exploration both of the role that classics played in colonialism and in the 'writing back' against the empire, this volume serves as an important next step following the volume edited by Barbara Goff in 2005 and published by Duckworth, Classics and Colonialism, which is a collection of essays based on a conference in 2001 at the Institute of Classical Studies in London. Goff says, in her introduction to that volume (1), that the essays "investigate a selection of the ways in which the projects of the British Empire have been furthered or undermined by a cultural politics focused on the classics." Scholars new to this subfield of reception studies will find a rich sampling of the kind of work being done in this area, and scholars already engaged in questions surrounding the intersection of classics and colonialism will surely find many of these new essays stimulating. . . .

Contents: Introduction , Lorna Hardwick Case Studies: (1) Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, Felix Budelmann (2) Antigone's Boat: The Colonial and the Post-colonial in Tegonni: An African Antigone, by Femi Osofisan, Barbara Goff (3) Antigone and her African Sisters: West African Versions of a Greek Original, James Gibbs (4) Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and Africa: Implications for Contemporary Staging Practices, John Djisenu (5) The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame, Michael Simpson (6) Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise, Elke Steinmeyer (7) Sculpture at Heroes' Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe: Classical Influences?, Jessie Maritz Encounter and New Traditions: (8) Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa: The Voortrekker Monument's Classical Heritage, Richard Evans (9) Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial Verse-Novel as Post-Epic, Katharine Burkitt (10) A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott's Post-Colonial Philology, Cashman Kerr Prince (11) Arriving Backwards: The Return of The Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean, Emily Greenwood (12) `If you are a woman': Theatrical Womanizing in Sophocles' Antigone and Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona's The Island, Rush Rehm (13) Finding a Post-colonial Voice for Antigone: Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes, Stephen E. Wilmer Challenging Theory: Framing Further Questions: (14) `The same kind of smile': About the `Use and Abuse' of Theory in Constructing the Classical Tradition, Freddy Decreus (15) From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War: A Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy, Michiel Leezenberg (16) Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial Contestations, Harish Trivedi (17) Shades of Multilingualism and Multivocalism in Modern Performances of Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial Contexts, Lorna Hardwick (18) The Empire Never Ended, Ika Willis (19) Another Architecture, David Richards

Read the rest of the review here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-05.html.

Tartakovsky, Joseph. "Man of a Thousand Faces." CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Summer 2008).

Manguel, Alberto. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: a Biography. Douglas & Mcintyre, 2007. Alberto Manguel's slim "biography" is a literary history of Homer's epics, half criticism, half Britannica entry. In each of 22 short chapters, averaging ten pages apiece, he examines an angle of the Homeric phenomenon: the question of his existence; his reception by Greek philosophers; his heirs Virgil and Dante; the agonies of St. Jerome and Augustine of Hippo in reconciling him with Scripture; the excavation of Troy; his role in French debates between anciens and modernes; and his lessons on war and peace. Manguel flits about in time, but the progression is roughly chronological, from Homer's heroic age to our insistently anti-heroic one. The epics, thought to have been composed in the 8th century, have had few rivals in the inspiration of pedantry: an ancient scholar named Demetrius of Scepsis amplified 62 lines from the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships into 30 volumes. But Manguel, a critic, novelist, and translator born in Argentina and now living in France, writes with intelligence and curiosity. For a man of letters who has edited 23 anthologies and is reputed to possess a library of 30,000 volumes, he mostly avoids ostentation. Manguel's intent is to show that, for over 2,500 years, countless members of the species have found "in these stories of war in time and travel in space...the experience of every human struggle and every human displacement." The Iliad and Odyssey, which can be thought to represent the two great metaphors of life, a battle and a journey, are the "books which, more than any others, have fed the imagination of the Western world." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1559/article_detail.asp.

Feeney, Dennis. "Review of I. J. F. de Jong, et al., eds. TIME IN ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE." BMCR (July 2008).

de Jong, I. J. F., and R. Nuenlist, eds. Time in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Readers should be advised that the focus is rigorously narratological, so that the title is somewhat misleading: instead of Time in Ancient Greek Literature we might have had Some Results of Applying Narratological Analysis to Ancient Greek Literature. In their Epilogue the editors justify this particular narratological emphasis and make it perfectly plain that there are other approaches to the vast topic of time in narrative texts, such as the "philosophical-historical approach", or "through linguistics" (522). Their own aim has been to enlist contributors who can analyse a wide range of Greek texts through this particular lens, hoping especially to have a diachronic dimension which will throw variations over time and genre into relief (ix): in fact, the main overall conclusion is that "most narratological categories are not bound by genre: the same devices occur in different genres, and genres are not homogeneous where the use of narrative devices is concerned" (522). The risk remains, however, of seeing narratology as an end in itself. Too many of the papers in this volume end up appearing to have a virtually parochial interest in the categories of narratology per se, in a way that makes it hard to keep an eye on the larger picture that such analysis is meant to be elucidating. I kept thinking of the wonderful scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love when the actors have adjourned to the local pub after rehearsing Romeo and Juliet, and the actor playing the nurse is downing a pint as a friend asks him what this new play is all about: with the perspective of the true actor, he replies, "Well, there's this nurse..." I do not mean at all to decry the use of the analytical techniques or terminology of narratology, which can produce extraordinary interpretative results. In the case of Jean Genette, the pater narratologiae, his evolution of terminology in Discours du récit was continually in dialogue with the text of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, and the new forms of analysis he produced kept generating deep insights into the novel's core themes and concerns. Again, the point is simply that narratology is not an end in itself. There is a certain interest and utility in having it demonstrated in the case of all kinds of texts that they can be analysed in terms of analepsis and so on, but this demonstration would ideally be the beginning of criticism, not the end. The chapters in this book that really sing are the ones in which narratology is regarded as a tool instead of a goal; in these cases one suddenly sees how much light can be shed in unexpected places by the careful consideration of technique. Space forbids discussion of all the chapters, although they may all be recommended for anyone working on the authors in question, since they all succeed in demonstrating that narratological time-analysis has traction in each instance; I shall concentrate on some cases where the narratology seems to be more of a goal, and on some cases where it seems to be more of a tool. . . . Read the rest here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-07-24.html.

David, A. P. "Homer and the Mystery of Blushing: Mind, Body and the Distance Between." MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE December 11, 2007.

In his Principles of Psychology James espouses a notion of correlation or correspondence. Like most moderns, he has a preoccupation with the brain—which was unusual in the ancient world. There, it is the chest and lungs that are the seat of consciousness; they are also the bellows that exhale the shapes of air that we call "words". Words are "winged", according to Homer's epithet, because they must fly across a material medium in order to impinge upon another human's sense apparatus, before they can penetrate his consciousness. . . . Read the rest here: http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/714.

Howard, Jennifer. "Measuring the AENEID on a Human Scale." CHRONICLE REVIEW May 16, 2008.

For more than 2,500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for, and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. One could certainly describe Virgil's Aeneid as a manly poem. From its arms-and-the-man opening to its climactic blood bath on the battlefield, the Latin epic tells a tale of exile, combat, and slaughter, with a body count rivaling that of Homer's Iliad. Women figure mostly as collateral damage. In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil's dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden. . . . Bringing a sense of personal passion to the task, modern translators are reminding readers that for all the fierceness and grandeur of the events it describes, the Aeneid is also intimate, at times even tender. It raises an urgent question — What price empire? — even as it creates a foundational myth of how a great empire came to be. In an age that has had its fill of war and foreign adventures, Virgil's epic, written 2,000 years ago, still speaks volumes. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i36/36b00901.htm.

"Fragmented Narrative: the Narratology of the Greek Letter," Department of Classics, University of Wales Lampeter, September 21–24, 2008.

Recent scholarship in Classics and beyond has shown great interest in letters and epistolary literature of all forms (most recently in R. Morello & A. D. Morrison, Ancient Letters), including the narrative uses of the epistolary form (see especially N. Holzberg’s Der griechische Briefroman and P. A. Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions). The use of embedded letters to advance the narrative (among other functions) in genres such as historiography and the novel, and the potential for real or pseudonymous letters or collections of letters to function as (real or fictionalised) biography, autobiography, or historical narrative/novel, mean that letters in antiquity play a crucial role in the development of narrative literature of many kinds, especially biographical and novelistic. Spurious and fictional letters have also been recognised as important in tracing the origins of the novel in early work in this field, but have since then been marginalised by scholars working on the novels, as in other fields, until recently. The particular capacity of letters to reveal the private lives of the great and the good, and likewise of ordinary people, makes epistolary literature an essential consideration in studying the invention of prose fiction in antiquity. The great popularity of letters, with varying degrees of fictionality or literariness, as reading-matter rather than merely tools for communication, especially in the Imperial period, also makes it essential that we pay attention to this genre and its great quantity and variety of texts, if we are to understand the reading practices and appreciate the literature of antiquity without modern prejudices about the ‘artificiality’ of epistolary literature. Letters are always about narrative, among other things: whether directly—narrating events to absent correspondents; or indirectly—presenting fragments of, or oblique hints at, an underlying narrative which the reader must reconstruct. In contrast to more general epistolary studies, the aim of this conference is to explore both this inherent narrative quality of letters and its use by Greek authors in a variety of genres and kinds of text; and the fragmentary, limited, sometimes even wilfully obscure nature of epistolary narratives which omit vital information in the name of verisimilitude. The result will be a series of discussions of the narratives and the narratology of the Greek letter, taking into account fresh approaches to epistolarity from a variety of disciplines, and considering some usually neglected epistolary texts. An edited volume (not simply a conference proceedings) is the intended outcome. The literary qualities of many collections of Greek letters are often overlooked, despite the fact that they were evidently read (and in later cases written) as literature or as fiction and display the same awareness of generic conventions and self-consciousness of their literary nature as other kinds (e.g. engaging in intertextuality with famous earlier letter collections—notably the Platonic letters). The conference therefore also aims to restore letters to a place of prominence in scholarship on Greek narratives of all genres, and to explore the great wealth of epistolary material in Greek which has been far less studied than similar texts in Latin—and in some cases (especially the so-called epistolary novels) have no obvious equivalent in Latin. Texts which are studied for other reasons but whose epistolary-literary form has not been examined in detail are also central to the project. (Many collections of letters are studied as part of the history of philosophy, oratory, medicine, etc., but there is much to be said about them as narratives and as epistolary literature.) Other texts, clearly spurious but purporting to be documents in the lives of famous historical characters, have been neglected largely because of their spuriousness, but are nevertheless significant in the development of epistolary and fictional literature and their relation to one another. Texts whose epistolarity seems only a ‘frame’ for some other form of text could also be considered, provided that they contain some form of narrative, however short. Further information may be found here: http://www.lamp.ac.uk/ric/conferences/fragmented_narrative.html.

"The Classical Sublime," Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, March 14-15, 2008.

What is the sublime? Influentially theorised by Burke and Kant in the 18th century, the concept has recently attracted postmodern and Lacanian analysis from philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Zizek. An aesthetic once exploited by Coleridge, Turner and the Romantics, the sublime today finds a home in the paintings of Barnett Newman and the films of David Lynch. The sublime’s classical roots, however, have been largely neglected and this conference aims to redress the balance, with discussion focusing on classical theorisations of the sublime (most notably Ps.-Longinus’s seminal treatise Peri Hypsous), on representations of the sublime in classical literature, and on the influence of these classical formulations on later understandings of the sublime. By establishing a cultural frame for the sublime different to those usually adopted, the conference aims to suggest new ways of understanding the concept. Conversely, consideration of ancient texts in terms of the long tradition of literature on and of the sublime will hopefully prompt fresh perspectives on these texts, their particular aesthetic modes, and these modes’ wider cultural implications.

Read the rest of the conference description here: http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/news/events/pg/view==month/date==01-03-2008/article==91.

CFP: "Stories of the Novel: a Workshop on Ancient and Modern Narrative Fiction," University of Bristol, March 8, 2008.

Sponsored by the Classical Reception Studies Network and the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Dr Robert Carver, University of Durham One of the most persistent 'stories of the novel' tells us that the genre appeared in the eighteenth century, and is inextricably bound up with the modes of thought and social formations of European modernity. Ian Watt's account of the Rise of the Novel, which suggests that the novel emerged in response to the needs of an expanding middle class, is still broadly accepted. Watt argues that the rise of the novel represents a decisive break with classical literature, one of many oppositions by which the genre is defined. It has also been famously been theorized by Bakhtin in opposition to the epic. The stories told about the novel have thus also been stories about the difference between 'the ancient' and 'the modern'. This one-day workshop aims to rethink the modernity of the novel in all senses of that term. Through short presentations, round-table discussion, and keynote responses, we seek to open up new dialogues between ancient and modern and to create new ways of theorizing the relationship between historical context and narrative form. How do considerations of the ancient novel disturb the modernizing ambitions of arguments like Bakhtin's? Do analyses of the modern or contemporary novel shed any light on the study of the ancient novel? How can historical periodization inform or hinder the study of a genre or form?

We welcome proposals for fifteen-minute presentations in the form of 150-word abstracts to ika.willis@bristol.ac.uk or h.c..j.power@exeter.ac.uk, by 15 January 2008. Proposals from postgraduate students are welcome. Dr Ika Willis, Lecturer in Reception: Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk