The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece

The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Stamatia Dova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317021061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece offers an innovative approach to archaic and classical Greek literature by focusing on an original and rather unexplored topic. Through close readings of epic, lyric, and tragic poetry, the book engages into a thorough discourse on error, loss, and inadequacy as a personal and collective experience. Stamatia Dova revisits key passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Pindar's epinician odes, Euripides' Herakles, and other texts to identify a poetics of failure that encompasses gods, heroes, athletes, and citizens alike. From Odysseus' shortcomings as a captain in the Odyssey to the defeat of anonymous wrestlers at the 460 B.C.E. Olympics in Pindar, this study examines failure from a mythological, literary, and historical perspective. Mindful of ancient Greek society's emphasis on honor and shame, Dova's in-depth analysis also sheds light on cultural responses to failure as well as on its preservation in societal memory, as in the case of Phrynichos' The Fall of Miletos in 493 B.C.E. Athens. Engaging for both scholars and students, this book is key reading for those interested in how ancient Greek literary paradigms tried to answer the question of how and why we fail.

The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece

The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Stamatia Dova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317021061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece offers an innovative approach to archaic and classical Greek literature by focusing on an original and rather unexplored topic. Through close readings of epic, lyric, and tragic poetry, the book engages into a thorough discourse on error, loss, and inadequacy as a personal and collective experience. Stamatia Dova revisits key passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Pindar's epinician odes, Euripides' Herakles, and other texts to identify a poetics of failure that encompasses gods, heroes, athletes, and citizens alike. From Odysseus' shortcomings as a captain in the Odyssey to the defeat of anonymous wrestlers at the 460 B.C.E. Olympics in Pindar, this study examines failure from a mythological, literary, and historical perspective. Mindful of ancient Greek society's emphasis on honor and shame, Dova's in-depth analysis also sheds light on cultural responses to failure as well as on its preservation in societal memory, as in the case of Phrynichos' The Fall of Miletos in 493 B.C.E. Athens. Engaging for both scholars and students, this book is key reading for those interested in how ancient Greek literary paradigms tried to answer the question of how and why we fail.

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110743534X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. This book retraces the trajectories of Greek ancestral fault and the varieties of its expression through the many genres and centuries where it is found.

Fallibility and Fallibilism in Ancient Philosophy and Literature

Fallibility and Fallibilism in Ancient Philosophy and Literature PDF Author: Therese Fuhrer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111316807
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Mankind’s constant struggle with physical as well as mental weaknesses is omnipresent in ancient literature: misconduct, wrongdoing, failure and experiences of contingency are anthropological phenomena. Ancient ethics, epistemology, and natural philosophy have developed different theoretical approaches and guidelines on how to act and how to overcome all kinds of problems. Christian theology, on the other hand, has explained moral failure as a symptom of original sin, comparing decline and destruction to a burden from which mankind is relieved only at the end. The contributions explore how ancient philosophical texts, both pagan and Christian, explain, conceptualize and integrate the myriad manifestations of human fallibility into the different philosophical schools. The focus is on anthropological, ontological and theological concepts that analyse and reflect human fallibility, as well as on the textual and linguistic representation of the phenomenon in ancient literature. Several contributions in the volume explore literary texts that discuss or illustrate the philosophical dimension of fallibility, such as satire’s or tragedy’s (often exaggerated) depiction of human weakness.

Ancient Greek Athletics

Ancient Greek Athletics PDF Author: Charles H. Stocking
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192607626
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The Ancient Greek Athletics offers the most comprehensive collection to date of primary sources in translation for the study of ancient Greek athletics. Because Greek athletics was such an essential feature of both Greek and Roman culture, there is an especially strong need for proper treatment and understanding of the texts and other media used to reconstruct practices and ideologies of ancient athletics. The sources in this collection are arranged chronologically from the Archaic Period to the Roman Imperial Era, with an extensive appendix discussing key themes and topics. The organization and in-depth presentation of textual sources is designed to help students, scholars, and general readers fully appreciate the broader social and cultural significance of ancient Greek athletics as it developed in different historical time periods throughout antiquity.

The Poetics of the Occasion

The Poetics of the Occasion PDF Author: Marian Zwerling Sugano
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719469
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Although Mallarme is commonly viewed as the high priest of the autonomous work of art, by far the bulk of his actual poetic writing was occasional verse. With few exceptions the works written after 1873 manifest a reinvestment in the world subsequent to the metaphysical crises of the 1860's. In addition to the "Tombeaux," the toasts, and certain of the "Eventails," Mallarme composed the Vers de circonstance, more than 450 quatrains and distichs inscribed on envelopes, postcards, calling cards, Easter eggs, small stones, photographs, and jugs of Calvados. This is the first comprehensive reading and analysis of the neglected late poetry, heretofore dismissed as of marginal interest." "This book has a dual purpose. By exploring the occasional verse of Mallarme, which itself thematizes the problematics of the occasion, the author seeks to rehabilitate such writing for critical study. She does this not by proclaiming its high seriousness, but by insisting on its casual, amenable, public nature. Unlike previous critics, who have often apologized for straying into the fringes of the canon, the author delights in the marginal, insisting that in a poetics of the occasion, traditional oppositions such as center/margin become skewed and break down." "The author's second purpose is to come to a better understanding of Mallarme in light of what he actually wrote, rather than the work projected in his correspondence and prose articles, which has claimed so much critical attention. Each of the chapters of the book highlights one aspect of occasional poetry through an investigation of representative texts, both canonical and occasional. The author also discusses the relationship between Mallarme's poetics and the plastic arts, tracing the changing conception of the representation of the monument from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the correspondences between the more radical aspects of Mallarme's practice of writing and the contemporary arts." "Far more than a study of a single writer, this book is the first to propose a pragmatic definition of occasional literature, to undertake a broad study of the problem of occasion in literature, and to trace the historical trajectory of occasional writing as a specific discourse. The book is illustrated with 27 halftones."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Staying Power of Thetis

The Staying Power of Thetis PDF Author: Maciej Paprocki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110678438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
In 1991, Laura Slatkin published The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, in which she argued that Homer knowingly situated the storyworld of the Iliad against the backdrop of an older world of mythos by which the events in the Iliad are explained and given traction. Slatkin’s focus was on Achilles’ mother, Thetis: an ostensibly marginal and powerless goddess, Thetis nevertheless drives the plot of the Iliad, being allusively credited with the power to uphold or challenge the rule of Zeus. Now, almost thirty years after Slatkin’s publication, this timely volume re-examines depictions and receptions of this ambiguous goddess, in works ranging from archaic Greek poetry to twenty-first century cinema. Twenty authors build upon Slatkin’s readings to explore Thetis and multiple roles she played in Western literature, art, material culture, religion, and myth. Ever the shapeshifter, Thetis has been and continues to be reconceptualised: supporter or opponent of Zeus’ regime, model bride or unwilling victim of Peleus’ rape, good mother or child-murderess, figure of comedy or monstrous witch. Hers is an enduring power of transformation, resonating within art and literature.

Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece

Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Richard Seaford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316772071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
Brings together a wide range of papers written with a single vision. Greek tragedy, the New Testament, representations of the inner self, Greek and Indian philosophy, Wagner: these seemingly disparate phenomena are analysed with special attention to the shaping influence of ritual and of money.

Homer's Iliad and the Problem of Force

Homer's Iliad and the Problem of Force PDF Author: Charles H. Stocking
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192862871
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The topic of force has long remained a problem of interpretation for readers of Homer's Iliad, ever since Simone Weil famously proclaimed it as the poem's main subject. This book seeks to address that problem through a full-scale treatment of the language of force in the Iliad from both philological and philosophical perspectives. Each chapter explores the different types of Iliadic force in combination with the reception of the Iliad in the French intellectual tradition. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the different terms for force in the Iliad give expression to distinct relations between self and "other." At the same time, this book reveals how the Iliad as a whole undermines the very relations of force which characters within the poem seek to establish. Ultimately, this study of force in the Iliad offers an occasion to reconsider human subjectivity in Homeric poetry.

The Poetics of Aristotle

The Poetics of Aristotle PDF Author: Aristotle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description


The Poetics of Philosophical Language

The Poetics of Philosophical Language PDF Author: Zacharoula A. Petraki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110260972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A close analysis of the Republic's diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato's remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic's prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato's distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust.