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In recent years, there has been no issue that has convulsed
academia and its role in society more stridently than the personal
politics of its institutions: who has access to education? How does
who you are change what you study and how you engage with it? How
does scholarship reflect the politics of society - how should it?
These new essays from one of the best-known scholars of ancient
Greece offer a refreshing and provocative contribution to these
discussions. What Is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal
voice of a scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and
cultural identity are acted out within an academic discipline, and
how translation, the heart of any engagement with the literature of
antiquity, is a transformational practice. Topical, engaging,
revelatory, this book opens a sharp and personal perspective on how
and why the study of antiquity has become such a battlefield in
contemporary culture. The first essay looks at how academics can
and should talk about themselves, and how such positionality
affects a scholar's work - can anyone can tell his or her own story
with enough self-consciousness, sophistication and care? The second
essay, which gives the book its title, takes a more
socio-anthropological approach to the discipline, and asks how its
patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of
identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of
the discipline of classics. This initial enquiry opens into a
fascinating history of change - how Jews were excluded from the
discipline for many years but gradually after the Second World war
became more easily assimilated into it. This in turn raises
difficult questions for the current focus on race and colour as the
defining aspects of personal identification, and about how academia
reflects or contributes to the broader politics of society. The
third essay takes a different historical approach and looks at the
infrastructure or technology of the discipline through one of its
integral and time-honoured practices, namely, translation. It
discusses how translation, far from being a mere technique, is a
transformational activity that helps make each classicist what they
are. Indeed, each generation needs its own translations as each era
redefines its relation to antiquity.
"We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a
love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual
kind." So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed, which introduces us to
the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became
Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria's reign,
while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm the prime
minister once wondered whether she was "the cleverest woman in
England or in Europe." The couple's six precocious children
included E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia
novels, and Margaret Benson, the first published female
Egyptologist. What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what
went on behind the scene, which was even more unusual than anyone
could imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out
novels, essays, and thousands of letters that open stunning new
perspectives including what it might mean for an adult to kiss and
propose marriage to a twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a
family could support or destroy relationships, or how the death of
a child could be celebrated. No other family has left such detailed
records about their most intimate moments, and in these remarkable
accounts, we see how family life and a family's understanding of
itself took shape during a time when psychoanalysis, scientific and
historical challenges to religion, and new ways of thinking about
society were developing. This is the story of the Bensons, but it
is also more than that it is the story of how society transitioned
from the high Victorian period into modernity.
'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and
made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by
Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire
of late antiquity. This book, the first general and systematic
study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why?
Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in
the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the
central issues of power, authority, openness and playfulness in
changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship
between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting
way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue
in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today's
world.
The nineteenth century was a period in which ideas of history and
time were challenged as never before. This is the first book to
explore how the study of classical antiquity and the study of the
Bible together formed an image of the past which became central to
Victorian self-understanding. These specially commissioned,
multi-disciplinary essays brilliantly reveal the richness of
Victorian thinking about the past and how important these models of
antiquity were in the expression of modernity. In an age of
progress, cultural anxiety and cultural hope was fuelled by the
shock of the old – new discoveries about the deep past, and new
ways of thinking about humanity's place in history. The volume
provides a rich and readable feast which will be fundamental to all
those seeking a greater understanding of the Victorians, as well as
of the reception of classics and the Bible.
Simon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the
Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past
in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of
classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to
religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the
Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and
Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the
nineteenth century's sense of history was reinvented through
things. The Buried Life of Things shows how new technologies
changed how history was discovered and analysed, and how material
objects could flare into significance in bitter controversies, and
then fade into obscurity and disregard again. This book offers a
new route into understanding the Victorians' complex and often
bizarre attempts to use their past to express their own modernity.
In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding
urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with
particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in
his introduction, 'What is a good city?', five questions motivate
the book: How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain
a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of
citizens? How does the city represent itself to itself, and image
its past, its present and its future? What is it to dwell in, and
experience, a city? How does violence erupt in and to a city, and
what strategies of reconciliation and reconstruction can be
employed? And finally, what is the relationship between the
infrastructure of the city and the political process? Following the
introduction, the twelve chapters are grouped into four sections:
Engagement and Space; Infrastructure and Space; Conflict and
Structures; and Curating the City. Through each chapter, the
contributors reflect on aspects of urban infrastructure and
culture, citizenship, belonging and exclusion, politics and
conflict, with examples from across the Middle East, from Cairo to
Tehran, Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Not only will Being Urban further
understanding of the topography of citizenship in the Middle East
and beyond, it will also contribute to answering one of today's key
questions: What Is A Good City?
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries
people's relationship with time has been transformed through
industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such
life-changing transformation - under Christianity's influence -
happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be
conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after
death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience
time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily
prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With
trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon
Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took
shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it
resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to
scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary
studies, and early Christianity alike.
These new and especially commissioned essays discuss the ways in which performance is central to the practice and ideology of democracy in classical Athens. From theater to law court to gymnasium to symposium, performance is a basic part of Athenian society; how do these different areas interrelate and inform the politics and culture of the democratic city? Drama, rhetoric, philosophy, literature and art are all discussed by leading scholars in this interdisciplinary volume.
This collection of original essays examines innovations in both the
theory and practice of classical philology. The chapters address
interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways. Some apply
theoretical insights derived from other disciplines, such as
folklore studies, performance theory, feminist criticism, and the
like, to classical texts. Others examine the relationships between
classics and cultural studies, popular literature, film, art
history, and other related disciplines. Others, again, look to the
evolution of theoretical methods within the discipline of classics.
Taken together, the essays offer a spectrum of new approaches in
the classics and their place within the profession.
We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a
love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual
kind. So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed, which introduces us to
the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became
Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria's reign,
while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm the prime
minister once wondered whether she was "the cleverest woman in
England or in Europe." The couple's six precocious children
included E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia
novels, and Margaret Benson, the first published female
Egyptologist. What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what
went on behind the scenes, which was even more unusual than anyone
could imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out
novels, essays, and thousands of letters that open stunning new
perspectives including what it might mean for an adult to kiss and
propose marriage to a twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a
family could support or destroy relationships, or how the death of
a child could be celebrated. No other family has left such detailed
records about their most intimate moments, and in these remarkable
accounts, we see how family life and a family's understanding of
itself took shape during a time when psychoanalysis, scientific and
historical challenges to religion, and new ways of thinking about
society were developing. This is the story of the Bensons, but it
is also more than that it is the story of how society transitioned
from the high Victorian period into modernity.
Who Needs Greek? is an interdisciplinary study of arguments on what ancient Greece has meant to western culture from the ancient world to today. The battles between artists and literary critics, historians and journalists, politicians and scholars, are often violent, hilarious, and always passionate. This cutting-edge cultural history ranges from ancient Greece via the Renaissance to modern opera, and treats a central question of culture in a way which will intrigue academics as well as a more general audience.
How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism
take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new
pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first
millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic,
this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its
literary productions make a significant contribution to the
cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.
Modern disciplinary silos tend to separate the fields of classical
philology and theology. This collection of essays, however,
explores for the first time the deep and significant interactions
between them. It demonstrates how from antiquity to the present
they have marched hand in hand, informing each other with method,
views of the past and structures of argument. The volume rewrites
the history of discipline formation, and reveals how close the
seminar is to the seminary.
These especially commissioned essays open up a fascinating and novel perspective on a crucial era of Western culture. In the second century CE the Roman empire dominated the Mediterranean, but Greek culture maintained its huge prestige. At the same time, Christianity and Judaism were vying for followers against the lures of such an elite cultural life. This book looks at how writers in Greek from all areas of Empire society responded to their political position, to intellectual authority, to religious and social pressures.
'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and
made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by
Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire
of late antiquity. This book, a general and systematic study of the
genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did
dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same
way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues
of power, authority, openness and playfulness in changing cultural
contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form
and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages
closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider
social, cultural and religious contexts in today's world.
From the time of the Roman Empire onwards, fifth- and
fourth-century Greece have been held to be the period and place in
which civilization as the West knows it developed. Classical
scholars have sought to justify these claims in detail by
describing developments in fields such as democratic politics, art,
rationality, historiography, literature, philosophy, medicine and
music, in which classical Greece has been held to have made a
revolutionary contribution. In this volume a distinguished cast of
contributors offers a fresh consideration of these claims, asking
both whether they are well based and what is at stake for their
proposers and for us in making them. They look both at modern
scholarly argument and its basis and at the claims made by the
scholars of the Second Sophistic. The volume will be of interest
not only to classical scholars but to all who are interested in the
history of scholarship.
This 2009 book contains thirteen essays by senior international
experts on Greek tragedy looking at Sophocles' dramas. They
reassess their crucial role in the creation of the tragic
repertoire, in the idea of the tragic canon in antiquity, and in
the making and infinite re-creation of the tragic tradition in the
Renaissance and beyond. The introduction looks at the paradigm
shifts during the twentieth century in the theory and practice of
Greek theatre, in order to gain a perspective on the current state
of play in Sophoclean studies. The following three sections explore
respectively the way that Sophocles' tragedies provoked and
educated their original Athenian democratic audience, the language,
structure and lasting impact of his Oedipus plays, and the
centrality of his oeuvre in the development of the tragic tradition
in Aeschylus, Euripides, ancient philosophical theory,
fourth-century tragedy and Shakespeare.
This is the first general study of the earliest writers of Greek
prose for students and teachers alike. Looking at history,
medicine, science, philosophy and rhetoric, it asks why and how
these new genres of writing came about in the fifth and fourth
centuries BCE. It is thus a study of the cultural and political
revolution known as the Greek enlightenment, which has proved so
influential and important for modern Western thought and society.
Questions discussed include how and why rhetoric played such a role
in democracy, how history written in prose changes a view of the
past, and how science and philosophy construct new models of
understanding what authority is. An exploration is offered of how
literary history and social and political history interact. Written
in a lively and clear style, the book makes a perfect introduction
to the classical world of Athens.
This 2009 book contains thirteen essays by senior international
experts on Greek tragedy looking at Sophocles' dramas. They
reassess their crucial role in the creation of the tragic
repertoire, in the idea of the tragic canon in antiquity, and in
the making and infinite re-creation of the tragic tradition in the
Renaissance and beyond. The introduction looks at the paradigm
shifts during the twentieth century in the theory and practice of
Greek theatre, in order to gain a perspective on the current state
of play in Sophoclean studies. The following three sections explore
respectively the way that Sophocles' tragedies provoked and
educated their original Athenian democratic audience, the language,
structure and lasting impact of his Oedipus plays, and the
centrality of his oeuvre in the development of the tragic tradition
in Aeschylus, Euripides, ancient philosophical theory,
fourth-century tragedy and Shakespeare.
From the time of the Roman Empire onwards, fifth- and
fourth-century Greece have been held to be the period and place in
which civilization as the West knows it developed. Classical
scholars have sought to justify these claims in detail by
describing developments in fields such as democratic politics, art,
rationality, historiography, literature, philosophy, medicine and
music, in which classical Greece has been held to have made a
revolutionary contribution. In this volume a distinguished cast of
contributors offers a fresh consideration of these claims, asking
both whether they are well based and what is at stake for their
proposers and for us in making them. They look both at modern
scholarly argument and its basis and at the claims made by the
scholars of the Second Sophistic. The volume will be of interest
not only to classical scholars but to all who are interested in the
history of scholarship.
From the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses,
Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy
remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition
to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the
pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age.
Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose,
renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing
demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today.
In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and
then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were
actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major
problems facing any company performing these works today: the
staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the
actor's role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of
politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment
of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient
world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a
pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides
insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the
best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and
Continental Europe.
One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary
performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious
literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once
so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and
enlighten all directors and performers--not to mention the growing
audiences--of ancientGreek theater.
These especially commissioned essays open up a fascinating
perspective on a crucial era of western culture. In the second
century CE the Roman empire dominated the Mediterranean, but Greek
culture maintained its huge prestige. At the same time,
Christianity and Judaism were vying for followers against the lures
of such an elite cultural life. This book looks at how writers in
Greek from all areas of Empire society respond to their political
position, to intellectual authority, to religions and social
pressures. It explores the interesting cultural clashes from which
Christianity emerged to dominate the Empire. It presents a series
of brilliant insights into how the culture of Empire functions and
offers a fascinating and alternative understanding of the long
history of imperialism and cultural conflict.
The specially-commissioned essays in this 1999 book discuss the
ways in which performance is central to the practice and ideology
of democracy in classical Athens. From theatre to law-court to
gymnasium to symposium, performance is a basic part of Athenian
society; how do these different areas interrelate and inform the
politics and culture of the democratic city? Drama, rhetoric,
philosophy, literature and art are all discussed by leading
scholars in this interdisciplinary volume.
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