Latin Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-126
Author(s):  
Christopher Whitton

Nos ausi reserare… (‘We dare unbolt…’): a small but weighty beginning, with the new Loeb Ennius. It's nearly eighty years since E. H. Warmington finished his four-volume Remains of Old Latin (1935–40), combining the fragments of Ennius, Lucilius, Accius, and other pre-Sullan poetry in cheerful farrago with the Twelve Tables and a book of ‘archaic inscriptions’. The dry title notwithstanding, this was a flagship collection from a long-serving general editor of the Loeb Classical Library (1937–74): the scholarship was valiant, despite the slips so fully catalogued by unkinder reviewers, and the product has exerted wide influence as the go-to ‘accessible’ edition of so much important material – even if l'Année Philologique insists on calling its editor ‘Brian’ (his son: talk about tuer le père). Still, eighty years are a long time even in Classics, and an update could fairly be called overdue; happy news, then, that Harvard have commissioned Gesine Manuwald, another London professor, to oversee it. The new title is Fragmentary Republican Latin, more of a mouthful but a touch less downbeat; the remit is extended to include oratory and historiography; and the first instalment is a chunky Ennian diptych (one book for the Annals, one for the rest), jointly curated by Manuwald and Sander M. Goldberg.

In our time, not too long ago, the universities of the world have been fast to take care of the study of an innovative type of technical and human studies, called the science of "comparative literature". Comparative research studies have grown and flourished rapidly in response to the demands of both mental and artistic life. This shows the increasing awareness at both the modern national and the international levels in order to develop through connecting with the international intellectual, nental and artistic currents to nurture ethics and originality. Comparative studies show that the beginning of the comparative literature goes back to the time when the Latin literature was connected to the Greek literature and the comparative literature was shaped in the era of European Renaissance. Today, it is one of the most authentic sciences in universities, with complex branches, due to its being an inevitable result of increasing human awareness and the result of the great demand by the conscious public to benefit from the many human and cognitive aspects provided by the comparative literature through its connection with the heritage of the world literature and unity of the human spirit in its past and present. One of the most important factors of the prosperity of any civilization is the degree of contact with and benefit from other civilizations. Long time ago, different cultures were used to enrich each other, and the relationship between cultures took many forms such as imitation, translation, influencing others, as well as the exchange of information between cultures, in addition to intellectual and cultural invasion and domination. It is impossible to imagine that a particular culture evolved without any contact with other cultures. Instead, any isolated culture certainly suffered from deterioration.


2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
Patricia Keeney ◽  
Don Rubin

The festival season in Stratford, Ontario, was fraught with an offstage drama which seemed to reprise that of thirty years ago, when an experiment with a triumviral directorate ended in dissension and near disaster. However, once the dust had settled, an interestingly balanced season emerged, mixing Shakespeare and Shaw, ancient Greek and modern tragedy, Beckett and balletic Moby Dick. Here Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin offer their assessment of a wide-ranging repertoire. Patricia Keeney is a poet, novelist and long-time theatre critic for the monthly journal Canadian Forum. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Toronto's York University. Don Rubin is the founding editor of the quarterly Canadian Theatre Review, General Editor of Routledge's six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and Director of the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies at Toronto's York University.


Ramus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 161-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Malamud

When Seneca's Medea flies off in her serpent-drawn chariot, shedding ruin, heartbreak and death and leaving it all behind her on the stage, we are too stunned to wonder where she might be headed. As it turns out, this enterprising exile continued her career with great success in Roman Africa. This essay considers two remarkable Later Roman Medeas: Hosidius Geta's early third (?) century tragedy Medea and Dracontius' late fifth century epyllion Medea. Both were products of the flourishing, experimental, literary culture of Roman Africa that produced such writers as Apuleius, Tertullian, Augustine, Corippus, Martianus and Fulgentius. Although the two poems present radically different heroines, both exhibit the sophisticated allusivity, wordplay and interest in formal structures and rules that characterise Latin literature from Africa. One Medea makes a lethal intervention in Vergilian poetics; the other Medea channels a distinctively Statian Muse.Hosidius Geta's Medea is a short tragedy consisting of eight scenes and three choral songs that recounts the familiar events of Medea's vengeance in an unfamiliar form—it is the first extant example from antiquity of a cento. Mystery shrouds the origins of this Medea—we are unlikely ever to know for certain where, when or by whom it was written. It is probably a late second or very early third century text from Roman Africa. It is first mentioned by Tertullian, who brings it up as an example of the kind of improper manipulation of scripture perpetrated by heretical readers—that is, as a perverted form of reading. Tertullian's digressive expostulation is the first account we have both of Hosidius' Medea and of the cento form, i.e., the creation of poems made entirely from lines or half lines of a master-text. Tertullian's wording, however, implies that his readers will immediately recognise what a cento is, suggesting that this art form had been around for a long time. More interestingly, in light of the later Christian adoption of the cento form, he disapproves of the reading practices their composition implies, and finds Scripture especially vulnerable to such abuse. It is not hard to see why the fundamentalist preacher Tertullian would be alarmed by the poetics of the cento, for centos expose the multivalent nature of language, forcing the reader constantly to focus on the protean ability of words to change their meanings depending on context. To one whose goal is to establish truth according to the authoritative rule of faith, such linguistic play is threatening.


Author(s):  
M. Iwatsuki ◽  
Y. Kokubo ◽  
Y. Harada ◽  
J. Lehman

In recent years, the electron microscope has been significantly improved in resolution and we can obtain routinely atomic-level high resolution images without any special skill. With this improvement, the structure analysis of organic materials has become one of the interesting targets in the biological and polymer crystal fields.Up to now, X-ray structure analysis has been mainly used for such materials. With this method, however, great effort and a long time are required for specimen preparation because of the need for larger crystals. This method can analyze average crystal structure but is insufficient for interpreting it on the atomic or molecular level. The electron microscopic method for organic materials has not only the advantage of specimen preparation but also the capability of providing various information from extremely small specimen regions, using strong interactions between electrons and the substance. On the other hand, however, this strong interaction has a big disadvantage in high radiation damage.


Author(s):  
YIQUN MA

For a long time, the development of dynamical theory for HEER has been stagnated for several reasons. Although the Bloch wave method is powerful for the understanding of physical insights of electron diffraction, particularly electron transmission diffraction, it is not readily available for the simulation of various surface imperfection in electron reflection diffraction since it is basically a method for bulk materials and perfect surface. When the multislice method due to Cowley & Moodie is used for electron reflection, the “edge effects” stand firmly in the way of reaching a stationary solution for HEER. The multislice method due to Maksym & Beeby is valid only for an 2-D periodic surface.Now, a method for solving stationary solution of HEER for an arbitrary surface is available, which is called the Edge Patching method in Multislice-Only mode (the EPMO method). The analytical basis for this method can be attributed to two important characters of HEER: 1) 2-D dependence of the wave fields and 2) the Picard iteractionlike character of multislice calculation due to Cowley and Moodie in the Bragg case.


Author(s):  
Yimei Zhu ◽  
J. Tafto

The electron holes confined to the CuO2-plane are the charge carriers in high-temperature superconductors, and thus, the distribution of charge plays a key role in determining their superconducting properties. While it has been known for a long time that in principle, electron diffraction at low angles is very sensitive to charge transfer, we, for the first time, show that under a proper TEM imaging condition, it is possible to directly image charge in crystals with a large unit cell. We apply this new way of studying charge distribution to the technologically important Bi2Sr2Ca1Cu2O8+δ superconductors.Charged particles interact with the electrostatic potential, and thus, for small scattering angles, the incident particle sees a nuclei that is screened by the electron cloud. Hence, the scattering amplitude mainly is determined by the net charge of the ion. Comparing with the high Z neutral Bi atom, we note that the scattering amplitude of the hole or an electron is larger at small scattering angles. This is in stark contrast to the displacements which contribute negligibly to the electron diffraction pattern at small angles because of the short g-vectors.


Author(s):  
M. G. Burke ◽  
M. N. Gungor ◽  
M. A. Burke

Intermetallic matrix composites are candidates for ultrahigh temperature service when light weight and high temperature strength and stiffness are required. Recent efforts to produce intermetallic matrix composites have focused on the titanium aluminide (TiAl) system with various ceramic reinforcements. In order to optimize the composition and processing of these composites it is necessary to evaluate the range of structures that can be produced in these materials and to identify the characteristics of the optimum structures. Normally, TiAl materials are difficult to process and, thus, examination of a suitable range of structures would not be feasible. However, plasma processing offers a novel method for producing composites from difficult to process component materials. By melting one or more of the component materials in a plasma and controlling deposition onto a cooled substrate, a range of structures can be produced and the method is highly suited to examining experimental composite systems. Moreover, because plasma processing involves rapid melting and very rapid cooling can be induced in the deposited composite, it is expected that processing method can avoid some of the problems, such as interfacial degradation, that are associated with the relatively long time, high temperature exposures that are induced by conventional processing methods.


Author(s):  
Shailesh R. Sheth ◽  
Jayesh R. Bellare

Specimen support and astigmatism correction in Electron Microscopy are at least two areas in which lacey polymer films find extensive applications. Although their preparation has been studied for a very long time, present techniques still suffer from incomplete release of the film from its substrate and presence of a large number of pseudo holes in the film. Our method ensures complete removal of the entire lacey film from the substrate and fewer pseudo holes by pre-treating the substrate with Gum Arabic, which acts as a film release agent.The method is based on the classical condensation technique for preparing lacey films which is essentially deposition of minute water or ice droplets on the substrate and laying the polymer film over it, so that micro holes are formed corresponding to the droplets. A microscope glass slide (the substrate) is immersed in 2.0% (w/v) aq. CTAB (cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide)-0.22% (w/v) aq.


Author(s):  
K.-H. Herrmann ◽  
W. D. Rau ◽  
R. Sikeler

Quantitative recording of electron patterns and their rapid conversion into digital information is an outstanding goal which the photoplate fails to solve satisfactorily. For a long time, LLL-TV cameras have been used for EM adjustment but due to their inferior pixel number they were never a real alternative to the photoplate. This situation has changed with the availability of scientific grade slow-scan charged coupled devices (CCD) with pixel numbers exceeding 106, photometric accuracy and, by Peltier cooling, both excellent storage and noise figures previously inaccessible in image detection technology. Again the electron image is converted into a photon image fed to the CCD by some light optical transfer link. Subsequently, some technical solutions are discussed using the detection quantum efficiency (DQE), resolution, pixel number and exposure range as figures of merit.A key quantity is the number of electron-hole pairs released in the CCD sensor by a single primary electron (PE) which can be estimated from the energy deposit ΔE in the scintillator,


Author(s):  
Rudolf Oldenbourg

The polarized light microscope has the unique potential to measure submicroscopic molecular arrangements dynamically and non-destructively in living cells and other specimens. With the traditional pol-scope, however, single images display only those anisotropic structures that have a limited range of orientations with respect to the polarization axes of the microscope. Furthermore, rapid measurements are restricted to a single image point or single area that exhibits uniform birefringence or other form of optical anisotropy, while measurements comparing several image points take an inordinately long time.We are developing a new kind of polarized light microscope which combines speed and high resolution in its measurement of the specimen anisotropy, irrespective of its orientation. The design of the new pol-scope is based on the traditional polarized light microscope with two essential modifications: circular polarizers replace linear polarizers and two electro-optical modulators replace the traditional compensator. A video camera and computer assisted image analysis provide measurements of specimen anisotropy in rapid succession for all points of the image comprising the field of view.


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