Pericles, Cincinnatus, and Zombies: Classicizing Nostalgia in The Walking Dead (2010–)

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Laura Gawlinski
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
George Washington ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Model ◽  
Walking Dead

In the third of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy, Gawlinski discusses how the “flu episodes” of The Walking Dead’s fourth season re-animate a highly influential classical plague narrative: when the civic ideals of “golden age” Athens, lauded by Pericles in the famous Funeral Oration featured in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, fall to the lawlessness (anomia) spurred by an outbreak of plague as the walled city is besieged by the Spartans. The series’ dramatization of the community’s failure to live up to its ideals interlaces with the struggle of its protagonist, former sheriff Rick Grimes, to follow an example from the Roman Republican strand of the classical tradition. Cincinnatus, the Roman leader who temporarily left his farm to save the state by taking up emergency powers in wartime, then returned to pastoral life voluntarily, has been invoked as a model for American leaders since George Washington. Grimes tries but fails to follow this Roman model, further undermining the community’s attempt at Athenian-style civic life and abandoning the communal farm. Thus two classical models promoting a turn away from strife are shown as unsustainable, like the golden age itself.

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Societies ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Building Activities

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition explores how films and television programs have engaged with one of the most powerful myths in the Western classical tradition: that humans once lived under ideal conditions, as defined by proximity to the divine. We feel nostalgia for this imagined origin, regret at being born too late to enjoy it, and worry over why we lost it. We seek to recover that “golden age” by religious piety—or, by technological innovation, try to create our own utopia. The breach between this imagined world and lived reality renders these mythical constructs as powerful political tools. For the “golden age” concept influences how participants in the Western classical tradition view our own times by comparison, as an “iron age” whose degradation we lament and wish to escape. This “golden age” complex has manifested in the world-building activities of ancient Greek and Roman texts, from Hesiod to Suetonius, and in modernity’s hagiographic memory of certain historical societies: Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. These fourteen collected essays discuss how golden age themes animate screen texts ranging from prestige projects like Gladiator and HBO’s Rome, to cult classics like Xanadu and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, to films made by auteurs including Jules Dassin’s Phaedra and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Essays also examine the classical “golden age” tradition in fantasy (Game of Thrones), science fiction (Serenity), horror (The Walking Dead), war/combat (the 300 franchise, Centurion, The Eagle), and the American Western.

A genealogy of hacking

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 528-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Free Software ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
Core Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Frame

Hacking is now a widely discussed and known phenomenon, but remains difficult to define and empirically identify because it has come to refer to many different, sometimes incompatible, material practices. This article proposes genealogy as a framework for understanding hacking by briefly revisiting Foucault’s concept of genealogy and interpreting its perspectival stance through the feminist materialist concept of the situated observer. Using genealogy as a theoretical frame, a history of hacking will be proposed in four phases. The first phase is the ‘prehistory’ of hacking in which four core practices were developed. The second phase is the ‘golden age of cracking’ in which hacking becomes a self-conscious identity and community and is for many identified with breaking into computers, even while non-cracking practices such as free software mature. The third phase sees hacking divide into a number of new practices even while old practices continue, including the rise of serious cybercrime, hacktivism, the division of Open Source and Free Software and hacking as an ethic of business and work. The final phase sees broad consciousness of state-sponsored hacking, the re-rise of hardware hacking in maker labs and hack spaces and the diffusion of hacking into a broad ‘clever’ practice. In conclusion, it will be argued that hacking consists across all the practices surveyed of an interrogation of the rationality of information technocultures enacted by each hacker practice situating itself within a particular technoculture and then using that technoculture to change itself, both in changing potential actions that can be taken and changing the nature of the technoculture itself.

Clarendon and the Caroline Myth of Peace

1984 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond A. Anselment
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Rule ◽  
The Relationship

The origins of the Civil War are apparent from the outset of theHistory of the Rebellion:“he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of the time,” Clarendon contends, “will find all this bulk of misery to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us, from the same natural causes and means which have usually attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification, and castigation of Heaven.” The relationship between prosperity and calamity is, of course, commonplace in classical as well as seventeenth-century chronicles of civil conflict, but both the sections of theHistorywritten in 1646 and those added some twenty years later insist that “the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation” (I, 84). Although he modifies his praise of this peaceful era inThe Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon,claiming that“Englandenjoyed the greatest Measure of Felicity that it [and not, as he earlier said, any nation] had ever known,” this view of Caroline prosperity remains extreme. Clarendon likens the years of Charles's personal rule to a golden age. Without specifically invoking the classical tradition of the halcyon calm or the return of Astraea, his recollection of the 1630s gives central importance and new immediacy to a well-established Caroline myth of peace.Modern historians have generally found much amiss in the decade of Charles's personal rule, and they have naturally questioned Clarendon's characterization of unrivalled happiness. Only B. H. G. Wormald's seminal study of Clarendon accepts the notion of “unparalleled prosperity,” which, it argues, “is an indisputable fact so far at least as the gentry were concerned.”

The ages of voluntarism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Hilton ◽  
James Mckay
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Third Sector ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Big Society ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides the historical background to the rise of the Big Society, surveying the history of voluntarism over the last century. Politicians and commentators have long bemoaned the supposed decline of civic life, fretting about its health and its future. In fact, the real story of voluntarism over the last hundred years has not been decline, but constant evolution and change. Whether the terms charity, philanthropy, civil society, non-governmental organisations, the third sector or the Big Society are used, voluntary endeavour is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of British public life. Voluntarism not only continues to thrive, but is also far larger than any political agenda that may be imposed upon it.

scholarly journals WALKING DEAD IN THE LIFE OF EASTERN SLAVS: "MAGIA POSTHUMA" IN ANCIENT RUS AND VAMPIRISM IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA

2020 ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
T. M. Bohn ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Walking Dead

From the period of Kievan Rus, there is earlier evidence of the belief in vampires than was found in the supposed homeland of vampires in southeastern Europe. The premise of this belief is the universal idea that after death, the soul is separated from the body. In the popular imagination, when the separation of the soul from the body of the deceased was not done peacefully or burial rites were not observed, making it possible to go to another world, this could lead to the return of the deceased, often in the form of a demonic entity. The old Russian word "upir" fell out of use in the Moscow state. However, it survived on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Union and reappeared on the territory of modern Ukraine and Belarus as part of the Russian Empire. Therefore, the article discusses the question of how the belief in the walking dead was formed in Ancient Rus and in pre-revolutionary Russia. Initially, the harmful effects of these restless corpses were seen as the cause of epidemics such as plague and cholera, or droughts that led to hunger. Later, when it came to preserving traditional moral norms in gender relations, they resorted to the idea of devilish temptation. Nevertheless, from the point of view of Latin Europe, all forms of magic and superstition that contradicted the Enlightenment were considered barbaric and typical of the supposedly backward world of Slavs and Orthodoxy. The article develops the ideas formulated in the author’s book “History of the European myth of vampires”.

Ancient Revolutions in the Literature of Polish Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226
Author(s):  
Maciej Junkiert
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
Literary Reception

This article aims to examine the Polish literary reception of the French Revolution during the period of Romanticism. Its main focus is on how Polish writers displaced their more immediate experiences of revolutionary events onto a backdrop of ‘ancient revolutions’, in which revolution was described indirectly by drawing on classical traditions, particularly the history of ancient Greeks and Romans. As this classical tradition was mediated by key works of German and French thinkers, this European context is crucial for understanding the literary strategies adopted by Polish authors. Three main approaches are visible in the Polish reception, and I will illustrate them using the works of Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). My comparative study will be restricted to four works: Krasiński's Irydion and Przedświt (Predawn), Słowacki's Agezylausz (Agesilaus) and Norwid's Quidam.

A Universe of Societies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Debaise
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Relations ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.

The Origins of Gritty Realism on British Television: Euston Films and Special Branch

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Sexton
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of

Euston Films was the first film subsidiary of a British television company that sought to film entirely on location. To understand how the ‘televisual imagination’ changed and developed in relationship to the parent institution's (Thames Television) economic and strategic needs after the transatlantic success of its predecessor, ABC Television, it is necessary to consider how the use of film in television drama was regarded by those working at Euston Films. The sources of realism and development of generic verisimilitude found in the British adventure series of the early 1970s were not confined to television, and these very diverse sources both outside and inside television are well worth exploring. Thames Television, which was formed in 1968, did not adopt the slickly produced adventure series style of ABC's The Avengers, for example. Instead, Thames emphasised its other ABC inheritance – naturalistic drama in the form of the studio-based Armchair Theatre – and was to give the adventure series a strong London lowlife flavour. Its film subsidiary, Euston Films, would produce ‘gritty’ programmes such as the third and fourth series of Special Branch. Amid the continuities and tensions between ABC and Thames, it is possible to discern how economic and technological changes were used as a cultural discourse of value that marks the production of Special Branch as a key transformative moment in the history of British television.

Displace of Documentary Heritage from the Soviet Union to Poland during the Third Decade of the XXth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Tatsiana Hiarnovich
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Actual Process ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

The paper explores the displace of Polish archives from the Soviet Union that was performed in 1920s according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 and other international agreements. The aim of the research is to reconstruct the process of displace, based on the archival sources and literature. The object of the research is those documents that were preserved in the archives of Belarus and together with archives from other republics were displaced to Poland. The exploration leads to clarification of the selection of document fonds to be displaced, the actual process of movement and the explanation of the role that the archivists of Belarus performed in the history of cultural relationships between Poland and the Soviet Union. The articles of the Treaty of Riga had been formulated without taking into account the indivisibility of archive fonds that is one of the most important principles of restitution, which caused the failure of the treaty by the Soviet part.

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