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A comparative study of what the most influential writers of Ancient
Greece and China thought it meant to have knowledge and whether
they distinguished knowledge from other forms of wisdom. It surveys
selected works of poetry, history and philosophy from the period of
roughly the eighth through to the second century BCE, including
Homer's "Odyssey," the ancient Chinese "Classic of Poetry,"
Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War," Sima Qian's
"Records of the Historian," Plato's "Symposium," and Laozi's "Dao
de Jing and the writings of Zhuangzi." The intention, through such
juxtaposition, is to introduce the foundational texts of each
tradition which continue to influence the majority of the world's
population.
The "classical," Steven Shankman argues, should not be confused
with a particular historical period of Western antiquity, although
it may owe its original articulation to the literary and
philosophical explorations of ancient Greek authors. Shankman's
book searches for and attempts to formulate the shape of the
continuing presence--as embodied in particular literary works
mainly from Western antiquity and the neoclassical and modern
periods--of what the author calls a "classical" understanding of
literature.
For Shankman, literature, defined from a classical perspective,
is a coherent, compelling, and rationally defensible representation
that resists being reduced either to the mere recording of material
reality or to the bare exemplification of an abstract philosophical
precept. He derives his definition largely from his reading of
Greek literature from Homer through Plato, from the history of
literary criticism, and from the Greco-Roman tradition in English,
American, and French literature. Shankman reveals unsuspected yet
convincing connections among authors of such widely disparate times
and places. His idea of the "classic" that authorizes these
connections is presented as normative, thus making possible the
evaluation of literary works and, in turn, forthright discussion of
what constitutes the "literary" as distinct from other kinds of
discourse. Shankman's study runs counter to a strong tendency of
contemporary criticism that argues precisely against any distinct
category of the "literary." He offers a series of interpretations
that cumulatively advance theoretical discussion by challenging
scholars to rethink the critical paradigms of postmodernism.
At the center of the book is a discussion of the
quintessentially classic Valery poem Le Cimetiere marin and the
classic qualities it shares with Pindar's third Pythian ode, from
which Valery derives the epigraph for his poem.
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