Download or read book Damnatio Memoriae written by Michael Meyerhofer and published by . This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like most publishers, we at Brick Road Poetry Press list submission guidelines on our website. Additionally we go beyond the guidelines to include lists of "characteristics we like" and "characteristics we dislike." In Damnatio Memoriae, the winner of the Brick Road Poetry Prize, Michael Meyerhofer gives the impression of having gone down that list to check off each item one by one with almost every poem in the collection. As to the characteristics we dislike, he avoids them all including no "intentional obscurity or riddling," no "highfalutin vocabulary" or "lack of recognizable theme or topic." Without a doubt, these poems reveal wise insights on the human perspective, but never at the cost of being overly serious, scholarly, or mysterious. The reader of these poems faces no risk of boredom-quite the contrary. Imagination and a beguiling tongue-in-cheek tone are the trademarks of Michael Meyerhofer's poetry. His work hits all our "like" buttons as it speaks in "a coherent human voice," though not always his own or the one you might expect, but one with "a sense of humor" that uses "words and language as [a] springboard for playful exploration." In many of these poems, the speaker possesses an inquisitive mind with an avid interest in history and even pre-history, fueled by the Discovery and History channels, Google searches, and museums. These poems dramatize a mind capable of straddling centuries, combining in the same breath an ancient scene with a contemporary evaluation, as when in the title poem, "Damnatio Memoriae," we encounter a Roman "slave/who fell from a twine-wrapped ladder/that OSHA would never condone." Such use of anachronism strikes us as both clever and funny. In "The Original Swastika," we're guided briskly through history, spotting the association-laden symbol in cultures as varied as the Romans, early Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Navajos, and finally, "on the hoods /of German sedans." This whirlwind tour succinctly reminds us that the meanings of symbols morph over time and across cultures and that our recent memories and associations tend to obscure the resonances assigned in prior eras. His persona poems conjure speakers from worlds we know and from worlds we wish we knew, and every scene, setting or experience is depicted intensely with concrete imagery and drama. At first blush, "Dear Students," appears to argue for the conceit that writing poetry today rises from the same impulse that produced Stone Age cave paintings. Yet the poem does so much more than simply propose a comparison. It actually delivers a vivid experience from the point of view of a Paleolithic hunter, as if to say poetry is about beauty, guilt, and survival. Although many of these poems pursue history, the contemporary perspective and the everyday moment are not neglected. In "For Tanya, Whose Fate Remains Unknown," the speaker receives a phone call about "bad news" concerning a daughter he doesn't have. The surprise of the erroneous call sets off a poignant daydream of what peril the "daughter" Tanya might be suffering, and then an even deeper imagining of memories that might be slipping away from Tanya as she bleeds. These poems wake you up with their surprising twists, with the intensity of their speakers, and with the inventiveness of their lines and concepts. Sometimes these poems even risk offending the reader by tampering with archetypes, as in "Hansel's Redemption" where the question of what ever happened to Hansel and Gretel is answered with a scandalous narrative. As you may have guessed, Damnatio Memoriae easily asserted itself as the winner of our inaugural Brick Road Poetry Prize. We're proud to be publishing it and further encourage you to seek out Michael Meyerhofer's other books immediately. Keith Badowski & Ron Self Brick Road Poetry Press Columbus, GA

Download or read book Monumenta Graeca et Romana Mutilation and transformation damnatio memoriae and Roman imperial portraiture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The condemnation of memory inexorably altered the visual landscape of imperial Rome. This volume catalogues and interprets the sculptural, glyptic, numismatic and epigraphic evidence for "damnatio memoriae" and ultimately reveals its praxis to be at the core of Roman cultural identity.

Download or read book Negotiating Memory from the Romans to the Twenty First Century written by Øivind Fuglerud and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manipulation of the past and forced erasure of memories have been global phenomena throughout history, spanning a varied repertoire from the destruction or alteration of architecture, sites, and images, to the banning or imposing of old and new practices. The present volume addresses these questions comparatively across time and geography, and combines a material approach to the study of memory with cross-disciplinary empirical explorations of historical and contemporary cases. This approach positions the volume as a reference-point within several fields of humanities and social sciences. The collection brings together scholars from different fields within humanities and social science to engage with memorialization and damnatio memoriae across disciplines, using examples from their own research. The broad chronological and comparative scope makes the volume relevant for researchers and students of several historical periods and geographic regions.

Download or read book Damnatio Memoriae written by Jeff Biggers and published by Wings Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Damnatio Memoriae explores the role of the theatre amid the conflicts of immigration, human rights, citizenship, family, and legacy. From the clash of two theatre troupes on stage—one Italian, and the other composed of foreign actors—a new play emerges, revealing the history of Ancient Rome, its forgotten emperors, entangled cultural heritage, and today's unfolding stories on the Mediterranean Sea.

Download or read book New Studies on the Portrait of Caligula in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in New Studies on the Portrait of Caligula in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts address art historical, historical, and cultural issues raised by one of only two surviving statues of the Roman emperor Caligula (r. 37-41 C.E.).

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings written by Richard H. Wilkinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The royal necropolis of New Kingdom Egypt, known as the Valley of the Kings (KV), is one of the most important--and celebrated--archaeological sites in the world. Located on the west bank of the Nile river, about three miles west of modern Luxor, the valley is home to more than sixty tombs, all dating to the second millennium BCE. The most famous of these is the tomb of Tutankhamun, first discovered by Howard Carter in 1922. Other famous pharaoh's interred here include Hatshepsut, the only queen found in the valley, and Ramesses II, ancient Egypt's greatest ruler. Much has transpired in the study and exploration of the Valley of the Kings over the last few years. Several major discoveries have been made, notably the many-chambered KV5 (tomb of the sons of Ramesses II) and KV 63, a previously unknown tomb found in the heart of the valley. Many areas of the royal valley have been explored for the first time using new technologies, revealing ancient huts, shrines, and stelae. New studies of the DNA, filiation, cranio-facial reconstructions, and other aspects of the royal mummies have produced important and sometimes controversial results. The Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings provides an up-to-date and thorough reference designed to fill a very real gap in the literature of Egyptology. It will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, and researchers with an interest in this key area of Egyptian archaeology. First, introductory chapters locate the Valley of the Kings in space and time. Subsequent chapters offer focused examinations of individual tombs: their construction, content, development, and significance. Finally, the book discusses the current status of ongoing issues of preservation and archaeology, such as conservation, tourism, and site management. In addition to recent work mentioned above, aerial imaging, remote sensing, studies of the tombs' architectural and decorative symbolism, problems of conservation management, and studies of KV-related temples are just some of the aspects not covered in any other work on the Valley of the Kings. This volume promises to become the primary scholarly reference work on this important World Heritage Site.

Download or read book Damnatio Memoriae written by Sebastian Barker and published by Enitharmon Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Damnatio Memoriae opens with an autobiographical sequence of poems in which he evokes post and present loves, the urban landscape of London, and the hidden beauties of the Lea Valley. They are all occasions that point towards the reflections to come on the sacred dimension of love and the evil that arises when this dimension is lost. These reflections become a springboard into the main section of the book, in which Barker draws upon Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Ancient Near Eastern traditions to chart the search of the soul for faith in the face of cynicism, cruelty, corruption, and despair. Damnatio Memoriae is in the highest European tradition of St John of the Cross or the "terrible sonnets" of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is a salutary reminder that we ignore our spiritual needs at our peril.

Download or read book Unbearable Life written by Arthur Bradley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen’s existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names—“enemies of the people;” the “missing,” the “disappeared,” “ghost” detainees in “black sites”—but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure. Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life “unbearable,” unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the “life” of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.

Download or read book Damnatio Memoriae written by Magdalena Gorrell Jaen and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward the Retrieval of the Historic Memory of Spain In Ancient Rome, the senate would impose a dishonour known as the damnatio memoriae (obliteration of memory) as a form of punishment inflicted upon traitors or anyone who was not in the Roman emperors good books. In Francos Spain, this punishment provided the framework for the new states genocidal policy to exterminate all those opposed to the Fascist regime, that is, half of the Spanish population. The military coup that overthrew the legal Republican government with a bloody civil war that began July 18, 1936, inflicted a totalitarian regime under General Franco that remained in power until the Caudillos death in 1975. More than three-quarters of a century later, supporters of the movement to restore the Historic Memory of Spain strive to unearth and publish the stories of the hundreds of thousands of loyal men and women whose memory the Francoists have endeavoured to consign to oblivion and to damn for eternity. They shall not be forgotten.

Download or read book History and Silence written by Charles W. Hedrick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is so rare and refreshing to read a Roman history book which recognizes and celebrates the sheer difficulty of writing history” (The Times Literary Supplement). The ruling elite in ancient Rome sought to eradicate even the memory of their deceased opponents through a process now known as damnatio memoriae. These formal and traditional practices included removing the person’s name and image from public monuments and inscriptions, making it illegal to speak of him, and forbidding funeral observances and mourning. Paradoxically, however, while these practices dishonored the person's memory, they did not destroy it. Indeed, a later turn of events could restore the offender not only to public favor but also to re-inclusion in the public record. This book examines the process of purge and rehabilitation of memory in the person of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus. Charles Hedrick describes how Flavianus was condemned for participating in the rebellion against the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great—and then restored to the public record a generation later as members of the newly Christianized senatorial class sought to reconcile their pagan past and Christian present. By selectively remembering and forgetting the actions of Flavianus, Hedrick asserts, the Roman elite honored their ancestors while participating in profound social, cultural, and religious change. “One of the most interesting and original books about the Later Roman Empire that I have ever read.” —T. D. Barnes

Download or read book Political Memory and the Constantinian Dynasty written by Rebecca Usherwood and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of political memory and disgrace in the reigns of Constantine and his sons. It uses the conditions of the early to mid-fourth century to argue that the deconstruction of political legitimacy should be viewed, first and foremost, as a collective phenomenon, the result of the actions of a diverse range of people responding to political change. It also challenges many positivist and teleological narratives of the ‘Age of Constantine’. Shifting the focus from the emperor and his sons onto their rivals and opponents, the Constantinian dynasty is placed back into the messy and ambiguous political environment from which it emerged.

Download or read book Reset in Stone written by Sarah A. Rous and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the various ways ancient Athenians purposefully reused stone artifacts, objects, and buildings in order to shape their own and their descendants' collective ideas about their community's past and its bearing on the present and future. The book introduces the concept of "upcycling" to refer to this intentionally meaningful reuse, where evidence is preserved of an intentionality behind the decision to re-employ a particular object in a particular new context, often with implications for the shared memory of a group. Utilizing archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence, this investigation connects seemingly disparate cases of upcycling over eight centuries of Athenian history, treating the city as a continuously evolving cultural community. In establishin g upcycling as a distinct phenomenon of intentionally meaningful reuse, this study offers a process- and agency-focused alternative to the traditional discourses on spolia and reuse, while also making a substantial contribution to the growing field of memory studies by identifying a crucial component within the overall "work of memory" within a community. Through an original interdisciplinary approach, the book illuminates a vital practice through which Athenians shaped social memory in the physical realm, literally building their history into their city.

Download or read book Creative Selection between Emending and Forming Medieval Memory written by Sebastian Scholz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Valentin once asked: "How can it be that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day?" He focussed on the problem that information of the past has to be organised, arranged and above all: selected and put into form in order to be perceived as a whole. In this sense, the process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment – the “Urszene” – of making History. This book shows selection as highly creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres. The book demonstrates the variety how premodern authors dealt with "unimportant", unpleasant or unwanted past. It provides a general overview for regions and text genres in early medieval Europe.

Download or read book Fragmented Memory written by Nicoletta Bruno and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-02-21 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chance, in addition to the unavoidable ambiguity caused by time, is one of the main guilty parties in the transmission of ancient texts – or lack thereof. However, the same cannot be said for what concerns the mechanisms of selection and loss of historical and literary memory, where the voluntary awareness of obscuring is often part of a precise aim, thus leading the cultural memory of a literate society to become fragmented. The present volume explores the devices and criteria of selection and loss in Ancient and Medieval texts and the subsequent fragmentation of such literature, but it also addresses the questions of the damnatio memoriae, of literary strategies such as reticence and omission, as well as of known texts deemed lost but re-found thanks to state-of-the-art methods in digitization. The many and diverse nuances of the concepts of omission, selection, and loss throughout Ancient and Medieval literature and history are illustrated through a number of case studies in the four sections of this volume, each examining a different facet of the topic: ‘Mechanisms and criteria of textual loss and selection’, ‘Lost texts re-discovered’, ‘Voluntary omissions and desire for oblivion’, and ‘Re-working the known’.

Download or read book Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism written by James K. Hoffmeier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned for seventeen years in the fourteenth century B.C.E, is one of the most intriguing rulers of ancient Egypt. His odd appearance and his preoccupation with worshiping the sun disc Aten have stimulated academic discussion and controversy for more than a century. Despite the numerous books and articles about this enigmatic figure, many questions about Akhenaten and the Atenism religion remain unanswered. In Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism, James K. Hoffmeier argues that Akhenaten was not, as is often said, a radical advocating a new religion, but rather a primitivist: that is, one who reaches back to a golden age and emulates it. Akhenaten's inspiration was the Old Kingdom (2650-2400 B.C.E.), when the sun-god Re/Atum ruled as the unrivaled head of the Egyptian pantheon. Hoffmeier finds that Akhenaten was a genuine convert to the worship of Aten, the sole creator God, based on the Pharoah's own testimony of a theophany, a divine encounter that launched his monotheistic religious odyssey. The book also explores the Atenist religion's possible relationship to Israel's religion, offering a close comparison of the hymn to the Aten to Psalm 104, which has been identified by scholars as influenced by the Egyptian hymn. Through a careful reading of key texts, artworks, and archaeological studies, Hoffmeier provides compelling new insights into a religion that predated Moses and Hebrew monotheism, the impact of Atenism on Egyptian religion and politics, and the aftermath of Akhenaten's reign.

Download or read book Cleopatra and Rome written by Diana E. E. Kleiner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-31 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the full panorama of her life forever lost, Cleopatra touches us in a series of sensational images: floating through a perfumed mist down the Nile; dressed as Venus for a tryst at Tarsus; unfurled from a roll of linens before Caesar; couchant, the deadly asp clasped to her breast. Through such images, each immortalizing the Egyptian queen's encounters with legendary Romans--Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian Augustus--we might also chart her rendezvous with the destiny of Rome. So Diana Kleiner shows us in this provocative book, which opens an entirely new perspective on one of the most intriguing women who ever lived. Cleopatra and Rome reveals how these iconic episodes, absorbed into a larger historical and political narrative, document a momentous cultural shift from the Hellenistic world to the Roman Empire. In this story, Cleopatra's death was not an end but a beginning--a starting point for a wide variety of appropriations by Augustus and his contemporaries that established a paradigm for cultural conversion. In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture: religious and official architecture, cult statuary, honorary portraiture, villa paintings, tombstones, and coinage, but also the theatrical display of clothing, perfume, and hair styled to perfection for such ephemeral occasions as triumphal processions or barge cruises. It is this visual culture that best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception.

Download or read book Defacing the Past written by Dario Calomino and published by Spink Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Royal Numismatic Society's Lhotka Memorial Prize Defacing the Past: Damnation and Desecration in Imperial Rome is published by Spink in collaboration with the British Museum to accompany the author's current exhibition in Gallery 69a.