Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
English Translations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literature History ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Canonical Texts

Few authors of the Victorian period were as immersed in classical learning as Oscar Wilde. He studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, winning academic prizes and distinctions at both institutions. His undergraduate notebooks as well as his essays and articles on ancient topics reveal a mind engrossed in problems in classical scholarship and fascinated by the relationship between ancient and modern thought. His first publications were English translations of classical texts. Even after he had ‘left Parnassus for Piccadilly’, antiquity continued to provide Wilde with a critical vocabulary in which he could express himself and his aestheticism, an intellectual framework for understanding the world around him, and a compelling set of narratives to fire his artist’s imagination. Wilde’s debt to Greece and Rome is evident throughout his writings, from the sparkling wit of Society plays like The Importance of Being Earnest to the extraordinary meditation on suffering that is De Profundis. This book unites scholars in Classics and ancient history, English, theatre and performance studies, and the history of ideas to investigate the varied and profound impact that Graeco-Roman antiquity had on Wilde’s life and work. This wide-ranging collection covers all the major genres of Wilde’s literary output; it includes new perspectives on his most celebrated and canonical texts and close analyses of unpublished material. It also encompasses the main aspects of the ancient world that Wilde engaged with, its literature, history, and philosophy.

scholarly journals Anchoring Innovation: A Classical Research Agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ineke Sluiter
Keyword(s):  
Research Agenda ◽  
Revolving Door ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Electric Cars ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
New Research

Several periods in classical (Greco-Roman) antiquity provide an intriguing mix of being ‘in the grip of the past’ and profoundly innovative in all societal domains at the same time. A new research agenda of the Dutch classicists investigates this combination, under the hypothesis that the two are connected. Successful innovations must somehow be ‘anchored’ for the relevant social group(s). This paper explores the new concept of ‘anchoring’, and some of the ways in which ‘the new’ and ‘the old’ are evaluated and used in classical antiquity and our own times. Its examples range from a piece of ancient theatrical equipment to the history of the revolving door, from an ornamental feature of Greek temples to the design of electric cars, and from the Delphic oracle to the role of the American constitution.

Bali and Beyond: Eugenio Barba's Ur-Hamlet

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Ann Cremona
Keyword(s):  
International School ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

In this article Vicki Ann Cremona traces the development of the complex process of montage used by Eugenio Barba for Ur-Hamlet, based on the oral tale Amleth, which Saxo Grammaticus included in his history of the Danes (circa 1216). Besides Odin Teatret, the project involved a large number of actors and musicians from Bali, Brazil, and Japan, and other participants and trainees with whom Barba had worked at the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). The author here recounts how the work was developed from different cultural perspectives, describing how the actors' physical scores were combined without their cultural specificity being modified in any way. Vicki Ann Cremona is an Associate Professor at the University of Malta, currently serving as Malta's Ambassador to Tunisia. Her co-edited texts include Costume in Malta: a History of Fabric, Form, and Fashion (1998) and Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). She updated, revised and edited Nicola Savarese's Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present, translated from the Italian by Richard Fowler (Holstebro, Malta, Wrocław: Icarus Publishing, 2010).

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Public Baths ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chariot Racing ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Comprehensive History

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity covers the period 800 BCE to 600 CE. From the founding of the Olympics and Rome’s celebratory games, sport permeated the cultural life of Greco-Roman antiquity almost as it does our own. Gymnasiums, public baths, monumental arenas, and circuses for chariot racing were constructed, and athletic contests proliferated. Sports-themed household objects were very popular, whilst the exploits of individual athletes, gladiators, and charioteers were immortalized in poetry, monuments, and the mosaic floors of the wealthy. This rich sporting culture attests to the importance of leisure among the middle and upper classes of the Greco-Roman world, but by 600 CE rising costs, barbarian invasions, and Christianity had swept it all away. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.

Greek Inscribed Epigram

Classics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrej Petrovic ◽  
Ivana Petrovic
Keyword(s):  
Military History ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
Roman Antiquity

“Epigram,” (Gr. epigramma) is one of the terms that the Greeks employed, from Herodotus onward, for short verse-inscriptions, poems typically composed in hexameters or elegiacs in order to be inscribed, and as a rule originally associated with a particular object, occasion, and context (such as dedicatory, funeral, honorific, or sympotic). By the virtue of its metrical form it constitutes a category separate from the prose inscriptions, and by the virtue of its conciseness, its reliance on the object, and the occasion, it stands apart from other verse-inscriptions (such as metrical oracles, hymns, or aretalogies which in some cases may also have extraordinary length). The history of inscribed epigram started in the second half of the 8th century bce and continued throughout the entirety of Greco-Roman antiquity. Inscribed epigrams are attested in significant numbers in all major areas inhabited by the Greeks, but also in remote areas of Asia and Egypt where Hellenization was relatively short-lived. Inscribed epigram flourished again during the Byzantine period, and the practice of carving epigrams on public monuments continued in Greece well into the modern period. These texts represent an invaluable source for literary, cultural, social, religious, art, and military history. From the Archaic and Classical periods, around 950 inscribed epigrams survive; from the Hellenistic period, based on the estimates, more than 1,500; from the later periods, and until the end of antiquity, several thousand poems survive. Poems are composed in a variety of meters, among which elegiac, hexameter, and iambic and trochaic tetrameter were most popular, but later texts also occasionally employ relatively less common meters such as Sotadeus or Priapeus. Some of the earliest inscriptional epigrams, attested on pottery, are composed in iambic meter and associated with the sympotic setting; in the course of early 6th century bce, dedicatory and funerary epigrams, often consisting of a single hexameter, gain in numbers. From around the middle of the 6th century bce, elegiac became by far the most dominant meter and would remain so until the end of Classical Antiquity. From the late 6th century bce onward new epigrammatic genres appeared (such as, e.g., epigrams that are distinctly honorific in nature, which are sometimes called “epideictic”), and prose inscriptions of various genres increasingly find their counterparts in verse-inscriptions (such as, e.g., iamata, binding spells, or building inscriptions). From the 5th century bce onward, professional poets are attested as authors of inscriptional epigrams. From the 4th century bce onward, there is conclusive evidence of collections of inscribed poems. From the early 3rd century bce at the latest, inscriptional epigram becomes a model for the by then fully established genre of literary epigram.

scholarly journals English Drama in the Late of Victorian Period (1880-1901): Realism in Drama Genre Revival

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
M. Yuseano Kardiansyah
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Progressive Growth ◽  
William Robertson

A progressive growth in literature was seen significantly during Victorian period. These decades also saw an overdue revival of drama, in which the existence of drama was started to improve when entering late of Victorian period. Along with that situation, Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871) emerged as a popular drama writer at that time besides the coming of Henrik Ibsen’s works in 1880’s. However, Robertson’s popularity was defeated by other dramatists during late of Victorian period (1880-1901), drama writer like Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Beside Wilde, there were several well known dramatists during late of Victorian period. Dramatists as Shaw, Jones, and Pinero were also influential toward the development of drama at that time. In the discussion of English drama development, role of late Victorian period’s dramatists was really important toward the development of modern drama. Their works and efforts really influenced the triumph of realism and development of drama after Victorian period ended. Therefore, the development of drama during late of Victorian period is discussed in this particular writing, due to the important roles of dramatist such as Wilde, Shaw, Pinero, and Jones. Here, their roles to the revival of English drama and the trend of realism in the history of English literature are very important.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

Divination and Human Nature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter T. Struck
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Observable Fact

This book casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. The book reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, the book demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, the book notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, this book illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

Applying analytical procedures for performance audit of customs authorities

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1035-1055 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Pankova ◽  
V.V. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Distance Method ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Scientific Hypothesis ◽  
Financial Audit ◽  
Promising Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
Performance Audit ◽  
Analytical Procedures ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Customs Administration

Subject. The article considers the development of a set of methods and indicators of economic analysis, which can be used for performance audit of customs authorities, using the Volga Customs Administration case. Objectives. The aim is to justify the use of analytical procedures to rank the effectiveness of customs payments for the purpose of performance audit of customs authorities. Methods. We employ general scientific methods of research, i.e. dialectical and monographic methods, logical analysis, comparison, as well as the Euclidean distance method. Results. We reviewed works by Russian and foreign scholars on the history of customs audit development and internal financial control of customs authorities, gave scientific credence to attributing the system of customs payment and performance to the indicators of economic activity of customs authorities. Due to the lack of methods for assessing the performance of customs authorities, the use of analytical procedures during the performance audit seems to be a promising area. Conclusions. When verifying the scientific hypothesis put forward in the study, we established that the introduction and development of the ranking system for the performance of customs authorities related to the collection of customs duties can contribute to effective financial audit of customs authorities in general.

From the history of manufacturing Romanian nai at the turn of 20–21 centuries

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-74
Author(s):  
A. Drutsé
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Research Interest ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Technical Improvement ◽  
Performance Skills ◽  
Doctoral Candidate ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

The modern world popularity of the nai — a traditional Romanian instrument — has identified interest in writing this article. This problematic constitutes the circle of our research interest as a doctoral candidate, but also as a concert performer, a graduate of the Academy of Music, Theater and Fine Arts. One of the most interesting aspects of the study of nai is its technical improvement since 60s of the 20th century, which led to the acquisition of a number of new, innovative skills and performance skills. In this article we have identified some pages of the modern history of the manufacture of this ancient instrument associated with these processes.

ARTISTIC AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION AND MUSICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A SPECIALIST’S TRAINING

2020 ◽  
Vol 384 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
P. V. Menshikov ◽  
G. K. Kassymova ◽  
R. R. Gasanova ◽  
Y. V. Zaichikov ◽  
V. A. Berezovskaya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Native Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many ◽  
Special Meaning

A special role in the development of a pianist as a musician, composer and performer, as shown by the examples of the well-known, included in the history of art, and the most ordinary pianists, their listeners and admirers, lovers of piano music and music in general, are played by moments associated with psychotherapeutic abilities and music features. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities (using pianists as an example). The research method is a theoretical analysis of the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities: the study of the possibilities and functions of musical psychotherapy in the life of a musician as a “(self) psychotherapist” and “patient”. For almost any person, music acts as a way of self-understanding and understanding of the world, a way of self-realization, rethinking and overcoming life's difficulties - internal and external "blockages" of development, a way of saturating life with universal meanings, including a person in the richness of his native culture and universal culture as a whole. Art and, above all, its metaphorical nature help to bring out and realize internal experiences, provide an opportunity to look at one’s own experiences, problems and injuries from another perspective, to see a different meaning in them. In essence, we are talking about art therapy, including the art of writing and performing music - musical psychotherapy. However, for a musician, music has a special meaning, special significance. Musician - produces music, and, therefore, is not only an “object”, but also the subject of musical psychotherapy. The musician’s training includes preparing him as an individual and as a professional to perform functions that can be called psychotherapeutic: in the works of the most famous performers, as well as in the work of ordinary teachers, psychotherapeutic moments sometimes become key. Piano music and performance practice sets a certain “viewing angle” of life, and, in the case of traumatic experiences, a new way of understanding a difficult, traumatic and continuing to excite a person event, changing his attitude towards him. It helps to see something that was hidden in the hustle and bustle of everyday life or in the patterns of relationships familiar to a given culture. At the same time, while playing music or learning to play music, a person teaches to see the hidden and understand the many secrets of the human soul, the relationships of people.

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