Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses PDF Author: Evelyn Adkins
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472133055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The first in-depth examination of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius' Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses PDF Author: Evelyn Adkins
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE). Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses PDF Author: Evelyn Adkins
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472133055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The first in-depth examination of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius' Metamorphoses

Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome

Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004548386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The cryptic figure of the cinaedus recurs in both the literature and daily life of the Roman world. His afterlife – the equally cryptic catamite – appears to be well and alive as late as Victorian England. But who was the cinaedus? Should we think of a real group of individuals, or is the term but a scare name to keep at bay any form of threating otherness? This book, the first coherent collection of essays on the topic, addresses the matter and fleshes out the complexity of a debate that concerns not only Roman cinaedi but the foundations of our theoretical approach to the study of ancient sexuality.

The Fractured Voice

The Fractured Voice PDF Author: Amy A. Koenig
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299345300
Category : Classical literature
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Imperial Rome privileged the elite male citizen as one of sound mind and body, superior in all ways to women, noncitizens, and nonhumans. One of the markers of his superiority was the power of his voice, both literal (in terms of oratory and the legal capacity to represent himself and others) and metaphoric, as in the political power of having a "voice" in the public sphere. Muteness in ancient Roman society has thus long been understood as a deficiency, both physically and socially. In this volume, Amy Koenig deftly confronts the trope of muteness in Imperial Roman literature, arguing that this understanding of silence is incomplete. By unpacking the motif of voicelessness across a wide range of written sources, she shows that the Roman perception of silence was more complicated than a simple binary and that elite male authors used muted or voiceless characters to interrogate the concept of voicelessness in ways that would be taboo in other contexts. Paradoxically, Koenig illustrates that silence could in fact be freeing--that the loss of voice permits an untethering from other social norms and expectations, thus allowing a freedom of expression denied to many of the voiced.

The Power of Sacrifice

The Power of Sacrifice PDF Author: George Heyman
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813214890
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In this work, George Heyman offers a fresh perspective on the similarities between pagan Roman and Christian thinking about the public role of sacrifice in the first two and a half centuries of the Christian era.

Apuleius' Invisible Ass

Apuleius' Invisible Ass PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Benson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108475558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Argues that invisibility is a central motif in Apuleius' Metamorphoses, presenting a new interpretation of this Latin masterpiece.

Knowledge and Religious Authority in the Pseudo-Clementines

Knowledge and Religious Authority in the Pseudo-Clementines PDF Author: Nicole Kelley
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161490361
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Pseudo-Clementines are best known for preserving early Jewish Christian traditions, but have not been appreciated as a resource for understanding the struggles over identity and orthodoxy among fourth-century Christians, Jews, and pagans. Using the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Nicole Kelley analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the Recognitions . These strategies discredit the knowledge of philosophers and astrologers, and establish Peter and Clement as the exclusive stewards of prophetic knowledge, which has been handed down to them by Jesus. This analysis reveals that the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions is not a jumbled collection of earlier source materials, as previous interpreters have thought, but a coherent narrative concerned primarily with epistemological issues. The author understands the Recognitions as a reflection of complex rivalries between several types of Christian and non-Christian groups such as that found in fourth-century Antioch or Edessa.

Trans/Formations

Trans/Formations PDF Author: Marcella Althaus-Reid
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334049067
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Trans/formations is a new addition to "SCM's Controversies in Contextual Theology" series. Like anything coming from Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, it is controversial and challenging as well as highly original. The book will: make visible a range of trans lived experience [transgendered and transsexual], offer theological reflection on these experiences, create challenging theology from this experiential base, and provide a resource for churches and theology students not to date available. It includes an excellent range of contributors, including Elizabeth Stuart and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is a valuable addition to reading lists of courses on religion, gender and the body.

Tales of Dionysus

Tales of Dionysus PDF Author: William Levitan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472038966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
The first English verse translation of the Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis

Storytelling Slaves and Narrative Resistance in Apuleius' Metamorphoses

Storytelling Slaves and Narrative Resistance in Apuleius' Metamorphoses PDF Author: Sonia Anjali Sabnis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description