Divisive Scholarship: Affiliation Dynamics in Ancient Greek Literary Criticism

2021 ◽  
pp. 275-292
Author(s):  
Alessandro Vatri
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ancient Greek

Arguing over Texts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Camper
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Textual Meaning

Arguing over Texts presents a rhetorical method for analyzing how people disagree over the meaning of texts and how they attempt to reconcile those disagreements through argument. The book recovers and adapts a classification of recurring types of disagreement over textual meaning, invented by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric: the interpretive stases. Drawing on the rhetorical works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes, the book devotes a chapter to each of the six interpretive stases, which classify issues concerning ambiguous words and phrases, definitions of terms, clashes between the text’s letter and its spirit, internal contradictions, applications of the text to novel cases, and the authority of the interpreter or the text itself. From the dispute over Phillis Wheatley’s allegedly self-racist poetry to the controversy over whether some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters provide evidence he was gay, the book offers examples from religion, politics, history, literary criticism, and law to illustrate that the interpretive stases can be employed to analyze debates over texts in virtually any sphere. In addition to its classical rhetorical foundation, the book draws on research from modern rhetorical theory and language science to elucidate the rhetorical, linguistic, and cognitive grounds for the argumentative construction of textual meaning. The method presented in this book thus advances scholars’ ability to examine the rhetorical dynamics of textual interpretation, to trace the evolution of textual meaning, and to explore how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.

scholarly journals “The Play’s the Thing”: Mathematization as Dramatization

Paideusis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Dan Mellamphy ◽  
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Mathematical Thinking ◽  
Math Education ◽  
Learning To Learn ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Learning Mathematics ◽  
Negative Capability ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Mathematical Pedagogy ◽  
Mathematical Play

Mobilizing prevalent themes in the fields of mathematics education, literary criticism, and philosophy, this paper contextualizes ‘the mathematical’, ‘mathematical thinking’, and ‘mathematical pedagogy’ with respect to ancient Greek concept of mathesis, modern notions of mathematical agency, the Keatsian concept of negative capability, and the analogy of ‘staging’ a dramatic/mathematical ‘play’. Its central claim is that mathematization is dramatization—that learning mathematics (indeed, learning to learn, which is what the Greek mathesis actually means) is an activity of setting things up and (in this ‘set’ or ‘setting’) allowing things to play out (e-ducere). Beginning with Paul Ernest’s identification of the difference between absolutism and fallibilism in the philosophy of math education, and incorporating concepts from Pythagoras, Hippasus, Heraclitus (the ‘ancients’), Descartes, Kant, Keats (the ‘moderns’), as well as Freud, Heidegger, and Badiou (‘nos prochains’, to quote Klossowski ), we argue that ‘mathematical knowledge’ cannot be understood simply within the framework of logicism, formalism, or even simply as an epistemological articulation. Rather, we endeavour to show that the process of ‘learning mathematically’ allows us to gain insight into the foundations of ‘being’ itself (i.e. ontology). Learning to learn (mathesis) proceeds, as such, by way of staging and playing-out the half-known or unknown (the ill-seen and ill-said) in the hopes of uncovering the mystery (Greek myesis) at the heart of things.

Paracomedy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Jendza
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
And Performance

Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that paracomedy was a prominent feature of Greek tragedy. Blending a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, including traditional philology, literary criticism, genre theory, and performance studies, this book offers innovative close readings and incisive interpretations of individual plays. The author presents paracomedy as a multivalent authorial strategy: some instances impart a sense of ugliness or discomfort; others provide a sense of lightheartedness or humor. While the book traces the development of paracomedy over several hundred years, it focuses on a handful of Euripidean tragedies at the end of the fifth century BCE. The author argues that Euripides was participating in a rivalry with the comedian Aristophanes and often used paracomedy to demonstrate the poetic supremacy of tragedy; indeed, some of Euripides’s most complex uses of paracomedy attempt to reappropriate Aristophanes’s mockery of his theatrical techniques. The book theorizes a new, groundbreaking relationship between Greek tragedy and comedy that not only redefines our understanding of the genre of tragedy but also reveals a dynamic theatrical world filled with mutual cross-generic influence.

TheĒthos/PathosDistinction in Rhetorical And Literary Criticism

1984 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Gill
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Previous Article ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Ancient Greek

Jasper Griffin, in his recent book on Homer, has suggested that modern critics would do well to pay more attention to the localized insights and the general critical framework of the ancient Greek commentators. In a previous article, ‘Homeric Pathos and Objectivity’, he claimed to show, by careful study of those passages in which the scholiasts found ἒλεος, οἷκτος or πάθος, that ‘the ancient scholars were right to regard pathos as one of the most important elements in theIliad’. also think this is a potentially fruitful and underdeveloped approach to the criticism of Homer and other ancient authors; and that the termpathos, together withēthos, with which it is often coupled or contrasted, is one of the most suggestive, though also confusing, of ancient critical terms. I want to begin the story further back in time than the scholia, in the treatises on rhetoric and poetics from which the scholiasts’ critical vocabulary was largely derived. I propose to survey the use ofēthosandpathosas contrasted terms in these treatises from Aristotle to Longinus, in the hope that such a survey will not only clarify the various meanings and associations attached to these terms but will also throw a more general light on ancient critical presuppositions. Both Aristotle and Longinus used theethos/pathosdistinction to contrast theOdysseyand theIliad; and a clearer understanding of the significance they gave to these words may help us to appraise the critical usefulness of their comments.

scholarly journals Vulgar Sociologism: The History of the Concept

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-308
Author(s):  
Vladimir Bystrov ◽  
Vladimir Kamnev
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

This article can be considered as the history of the concept of vulgar sociologism, including both the moment of the emergence of this concept and its subsequent history. In the 20th century, new approaches were formed in the natural sciences about society and man which assumed to consider all of the ideas from the point of view of class psycho-ideology. This approach manifested itself somewhat in the history of philosophical and scientific knowledge, but chiefly in literary criticism (Friche, Pereverzev). As a result, any work of art turns into a ciphered message behind which the interest of a certain class or group hides. The critic has to solve this code and define its sociological equivalent. In the discussions against vulgar sociology, M. Lifshitz and his adherents insisted on a limitation of the vulgar-sociological approach, qualifying it as a bourgeois perversion of Marxism. They saw the principle of the criticism of vulgar sociology in the well-known statement by K. Marx about the aesthetic value of the Ancient Greek epos. The task of the critic does not only reduce to the establishment of social genetics of the work of art because he also needs to explain why this work causes aesthetic pleasure during other historical eras. In the article, it is shown that later attempts to reduce the complete spectrum of modern western philosophy and aesthetics into a paradigm of vulgar sociology of the 1920s is an unreasonable exaggeration. At the same time, in discussions in the 1930s, the question of the need of the differentiation of the vulgar-sociological approach and a sociological method in general was raised. As for sociology, this question remains relevant even today.

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