To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry,
dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments,
her biography as speculation. How is it then, Page duBois asks,
that this poet has come to signify so much? "Sappho Is Burning"
offers a new reading of this archaic lesbian poet that acknowledges
the poet's distance and difference from us and stresses Sappho's
inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary
history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic
subject.
In "Sappho is Burning," duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive figure
at the very origin of our story of Western civilization. Sappho is
beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of
reductively linear accounts of our common history. She is a woman,
but also an aristocrat, a Greek, but one turned toward Asia, a poet
who writes as a philosopher before philosophy, a writer who speaks
of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's
account of Greek sexuality, nor with many versions of contemporary
lesbian sexuality. She is named as the tenth muse, yet the nine
books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients,
troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the
history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. DuBois argues that
we need to read Sappho again.
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