Athens and Jerusalem

Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198852148.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-34

Author(s):

Vincent P. Pecora

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Immanuel Kant ◽

James Joyce ◽

Thomas Hardy ◽

Stephane Mallarme ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Meister Eckhart ◽

Promised Land ◽

Greek Thought ◽

Medieval Europe

Autochthony is fundamental to ancient Greek notions of belonging to the land. While the motif had a negligible presence in the literature of European Christendom, it returns with some force in modern productions by Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce. Martin Heidegger too draws on pre-Socratic Greek thought on the theme of autochthony. But there is a parallel tradition of belonging to the land that begins in the Pentateuch. In Exodus, God speaks to Moses about a Promised Land. In medieval Europe, Meister Eckhart reads Exodus as providing a special, mystical understanding of God’s soul, one that intertwines promised land with the human soul’s creative capacities, and lays the foundation for theologically infused politics in the German tradition. In Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and J. G. Fichte, nationalism is linked to Eckhart. In the twentieth century, Heidegger phenomenologically reinscribes earth, divinities, and dwelling poetically.

Download Full-text

Losev, Aleksei Fëdorovich (1893–1988)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-e026-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

George L. Kline

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Ancient World ◽

Soviet Regime ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Classical Scholar ◽

Greek Thought ◽

Russian Philosopher ◽

Marxist Ideology ◽

Theory Of Language ◽

Pro Forma

A leading Russian philosopher, religious thinker and classical scholar of the twentieth century, Losev made important contributions to the theory of language, myth and symbol, as well as to the understanding of ancient Greek thought and culture. He strongly resisted central aspects of modernization, in particular the spread of what he saw as ’bourgeois’ and ’philistine’ secularism, positivism, materialism, atheism, selfish individualism and ’machine civilization’. A scholar of staggering erudition with a lifelong passion for the ancient world, especially the thought of Plato, Losev could be a fierce, sometimes abusive polemicist. His relation to the Soviet regime ranged from open defiance in the late 1920s (which led to prison and the gulag for almost three years) to at least pro forma acceptance of certain key elements of Marxist ideology and philosophy in the period between 1953 and 1988.

Download Full-text

Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age

10.1093/oso/9780198852148.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Vincent P. Pecora

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Martin Heidegger ◽

George Eliot ◽

Manifest Destiny ◽

Meister Eckhart ◽

Promised Land ◽

Modern Age ◽

European Culture ◽

History Of ◽

Theological Politics

Despite its growing cosmopolitanism, European culture after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 was no stranger to ancient beliefs in a natural, religiously sanctioned, and aesthetically pleasing relationship to the land. The classical Greek notion translates as “autochthony”—literally, birth from the soil, enabled by a god. The biblical account in Exodus gives the idea of a Promised Land, designed for a particular people by their god. Twentieth-century versions of the first theme culminate in the Nordic (and then Nazi) notion of a Volksgemeinschaft—a folk community—built on the supposedly intrinsic link between Blut und Boden, blood and soil. And the idea of a Promised Land has motivated rebellious English Puritans, colonizing Americans obsessed with their “manifest destiny,” Dutch Voortrekkers, and a wide array of liberation movements.The many resonances of these topoi form a more or less coherent whole, from the novels of George Eliot to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, from thinkers such as J. G. Fichte to the Austrian historian Otto Brunner and the Indian social psychologist Ashis Nandy, and throughout the long history of Western aesthetics, from Meister Eckhart to Alexander Baumgarten to Martin Heidegger. The supposed cosmopolitanism of the modern age often obscures a deep commitment to regional, nativist, nationalist, and civilizational attachments, including a justifying theological politics, much of which is still with us today. Untangling the meaning of the vital geographies of the modern age, including how they shaped our accounts of literature and representation, is the goal of this book.

Download Full-text

The Project of Self-Education in Plato’s Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy ◽

10.5840/wcp20-paideia1998375 ◽

1998 ◽

pp. 290-297

Author(s):

Jeffrey S. Turner

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Moral Philosophy ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Ethical Concerns ◽

Greek Thought ◽

Moral Theories ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Ethical Work ◽

Late Twentieth Century

One vigorous line of thought in contemporary moral philosophy, which I shall call ‘Neo-Aristotelianism,’ centers on three things: (1) a rejection of traditional enlightenment moral theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism; (2) a claim that another look at the ethical concerns and projects of ancient Greek thought might help us past the impasse into which enlightenment moral theories have left us; (3) more particularly, an attempt to reinterpret Aristotle’s ethical work for the late twentieth-century so as to transcend this impasse.

Download Full-text

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

10.1093/oso/9780199583478.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Sheila Murnaghan ◽

Deborah H. Roberts

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

James Joyce ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Hilda Doolittle ◽

Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽

The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Download Full-text

Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190499341.013.24 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 369-383

Author(s):

Marian H. Feldman

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Cultural Relations ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

The West ◽

False Dichotomy ◽

First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

Download Full-text

Some Ancient Greek and Twentieth-Century Theories of Value

Grazer Philosophische Studien ◽

10.1163/18756735-000103 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 97 (3) ◽

pp. 374-385

Author(s):

Richard Kraut

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Human Good ◽

Good For ◽

Definition Of

Abstract Plato puts goodness at the center of all practical thinking but offers no definition of it and implies that philosophy must find one. Aristotle demurs, arguing that there is no such thing as universal goodness. What we need, instead, is an understanding of the human good. Plato and Aristotle are alike in the attention they give to the category of the beneficial, and they agree that since some things are beneficial only as means, there must be others that are non-derivatively beneficial. When G. E. Moore proposed in the early twentieth century that goodness is, as Plato had said, the foundation of ethics, he rejected not only the assumption that goodness needs a definition, but also that goodness is beneficial – that is, good for someone. This article traces the development of this debate as it plays out in the writings of Prichard, Ross, Geach, Thomson, and Scanlon.

Download Full-text

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

Theatre Survey ◽

10.1017/s0040557405390090 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 167-168

Author(s):

Edmund P. Cueva

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Greek Tragedy ◽

Classical Period ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

Download Full-text

Modernist Dante

The Oxford Handbook of Dante ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198820741.013.40 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 633-650

Author(s):

Daniela Caselli

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

James Joyce ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Ezra Pound ◽

First Century ◽

Djuna Barnes ◽

Dorothy Richardson ◽

Anglophone Literature ◽

The Past ◽

History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Download Full-text