Download or read book An Opaque Mirror for Trajan written by Laurens van der Wiel and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-19 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata (Sayings of Kings and Commanders) holds a peculiar position in his oeuvre. This collection of almost 500 anecdotes of barbarian, Greek, and Roman rulers and generals is introduced by a dedicatory letter to Trajan as a summary of the author’s well-known and widely read Parallel Lives. The work is therefore Plutarch’s only text that explicitly addresses a Roman emperor and is likely to shed light on his biographical technique. Yet the collection has been understudied, because its authenticity has been generally rejected since the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship defends Plutarch's authorship of the text, but some remain sceptical. This book restores its reputation and provides a first full literary analysis of the letter and collection as a genuine work of Plutarch, wherein he attempts to educate his ruler by means of great role models of the past. Plutarch’s thinking about the function of role models (exempla) is not only relevant for Plutarchan research, but also for our knowledge of exemplarity, a key feature both in Greek and Latin literature in the early imperial period in general. Therefore An Opaque Mirror for Trajan is also of interest for literary and historical scholars who study the broader context of ancient literature of the first centuries CE.
Download or read book Plutarch and his Contemporaries written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-02-26 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume puts into the spotlight overlaps and points of intersection between Plutarch and other writers of the imperial period. It contains twenty-eight contributions which adopt a comparative approach and put into sharper relief ongoing debates and shared concerns, revealing a complex topography of rearrangements and transfigurations of inherited topics, motifs, and ideas. Reading Plutarch alongside his contemporaries brings out distinctive features of his thought and uncovers peculiarities in his use of literary and rhetorical strategies, imagery, and philosophical concepts, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the empire’s culture in general, and Plutarch in particular.
Download or read book Aristotle s Zoology and Its Renaissance Commentators 1521 1601 written by Stefano Perfetti and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Herom written by Jeroen Poblome and published by Herom. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HEROM is a peer-reviewed online journal presenting innovative contributions to the study of material culture produced, exchanged, and consumed within the spheres of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman world from the late fourth century BC to the seventh century AD. The journal publishes papers in the full range of the scholarly field and in all relevant academic disciplines within the arts, humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences. HEROM creates a bridge between material culture specialists and the wider scientific community, with an interest in how humans interacted with and regarded artefacts. For a full table of contents, visit www.herom.be.
Download or read book Character Constellations written by Roel Smeets and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks that affects the representation of social groups: their centrality, their communities, and their conflicts. While reading individual novels in light of emerging statistical patterns, combining the formal methods of social network analysis with the interpretive tools of narratology, this study shows how central societal themes such as (in)equality and emancipation, integration and segregation, and social mobility and class struggle are foregrounded, replicated, or distorted in the Dutch novel. Showcasing what character-based critiques of literary representation gain by integrating data-driven methods into the practice of critical close reading, Character Constellations contributes to societal debates on cultural representation and identity and the role
Download or read book Interpreting Greek Tragedy written by Charles Segal and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This generous selection of published essays by the distinguished classicist Charles Segal represents over twenty years of critical inquiry into the questions of what Greek tragedy is and what it means for modern-day readers. Taken together, the essays reflect profound changes in the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period-in particular, the increasing emphasis on myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and semiotics.
Download or read book Bread and Circuses written by Patrick Brantlinger and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lively and well written, Bread and Circuses analyzes theories that have treated mass culture as either a symptom or a cause of social decadence. Discussing many of the most influential and representative theories of mass culture, it ranges widely from Greek and Roman origins, through Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and the theorists of the Frankfurt Institute, down to Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Bell, Brantlinger considers the many versions of negative classicism and shows how the belief in the historical inevitability of social decay—a belief today perpetuated by the mass media themselves—has become the dominant view of mass culture in our time. While not defending mass culture in its present form, Brantlinger argues that the view of culture implicit in negative classicism obscures the question of how the media can best be used to help achieve freedom and enlightenment on a truly democratic basis.
Download or read book Martin Versfeld written by Ernst Wolff and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Versfeld (1909–1995) is one of South Africa’s greatest philosophers, appreciated by academics and activists, poets and the broader public. His masterful prose spans the tension between disquiet and joy. Detractor of the violent trends of modernity, a critic of apartheid from the first hour, he was among the first philosophers of ecology. At the same time he celebrated the generosity of the world and advocated an ethics of simplicity, drawing on mediaeval theology and Eastern wisdom. His philosophy offered food for thought in dark times of the 20th century, as it still does for us in the 21st century. This first book-length study on Versfeld is an invitation to think with him on justice and exploitation, cultural difference and human nature, religion and the environment, time and connectedness.
Download or read book Culture and Cognition written by Ronald Schleifer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book challenges the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally separated scientific inquiry from literary inquiry. It explores scientific knowledge in three subject areas—the natural history of aging, literary narrative, and psychoanalysis. In the authors' view, the different perspectives on cognition afforded by Anglo-American cognitive science, Greimassian semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis help us to redefine our very notion of culture. Part I historically situates the concepts of meaning and truth in twentieth-century semiotic theory and cognitive science. Part II contrasts the modes of Freudian case history to the general instance of Einstein's relativity theory and then sets forth a rhetoric of narrative based on the discourse of the aged. Part III examines in the context of literary studies an interdisciplinary concept of cultural cognition. Culture and Cognition will be essential reading for literary theorists, historians and philosophers of science; semioticians; and scholars and students of cultural studies, the sociology of literature, and science and literature.
Download or read book John Philoponus on Physical Place written by Ioannis Papachristou and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the place of physical bodies, a major topic of natural philosophy that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. Aristotle’s conceptions of place (topos) and the void (kenon), as expounded in the Physics, were systematically repudiated by John Philoponus (ca. 485-570) in his philosophical commentary on that work. The primary philosophical concern of the present study is the in-depth investigation of the concept of place established by Philoponus, putting forward the claim that the latter offers satisfactory solutions to problems raised by Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition regarding the nature of place. Philoponus’ account proposes a specific physical model of how physical bodies exist and move in place, and regards place as an intrinsic reality of the physical cosmos. Due to exactly this model, his account may be considered as strictly pertaining to the study of physics, thereby constituting a remarkable episode in the history of philosophy and science.
Download or read book Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom written by Norman Austin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the male heroes of epic poetry, Helen of Troy has been immortalized, but not for deeds of strength and honor; she is remembered as the beautiful woman who disgraced herself and betrayed her family and state. Norman Austin here surveys interpretations of Helen in Greek literature from the Homeric period through later antiquity. He looks most closely at a revisionist myth according to which Helen never sailed to Troy, but remained blameless, while a libertine phantom or ghost impersonated her at Troy. Comparing the functions of contradictory images of Helen, Austin helps to clarify the problematic relations between beauty and honor and between ugliness and shame in ancient Greece. Austin first discusses the canonical account of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Helen as the archetype of woman without shame. He next considers different versions of Helen in the Homeric tradition. Among these, he shows how Sappho presents Helen as an icon of absolute beauty while she defends her own preference of eros over honor and her choice of woman as the object of desire. Austin then turns to three major authors who repudiated the traditional Helen of Troy: the lyric poet Stesichorus and the dramatist Euripides, who embraced the alternative myth of Helen's phantom; and the historian Herodotus, who claimed to have found in Egypt a Helen story that dispenses with both Helen and the phantom. Austin maintains that the conflicting motives that prompted these writers to rehabilitate Helen led to further revisions of her image, though none have endured as a credible substitute for the Helen of epic tradition.
Download or read book English Mechanic and Mirror of Science written by and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book National Cyclopaedia of Useful Knowledge written by and published by . This book was released on 1853 with total page 1034 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Edmund Burke for Our Time written by William F. Byrne and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly readable book offers a contemporary interpretation of the political thought of Edmund Burke, drawing on his experiences to illuminate and address fundamental questions of politics and society that are of particular interest today. In Edmund Burke for Our Time, Byrne asserts that Burke's politics is reflective of unique and sophisticated ideas about how people think and learn and about determinants of political behavior.
Download or read book Meaning and Interpretation written by G. L. Hagberg and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'What is the meaning of a word?' In this thought-provoking book, Hagberg demonstrates how this question--which initiated Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of language--is significant for our understanding not only of linguistic meaning but of the meaning of works of art and literature as well.
Download or read book Is Time out of Joint written by Aleida Assmann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse. In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.
Download or read book Seductive Reasoning written by Ellen Rooney and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist’s invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.
