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Donum natalicium

The Summer Before Austerity (June 2010): The Everyday of a Crisis in the Making

back Soo-Young Kim For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. — Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” Philology is that venerable art which demands… Read more

Donum natalicium

Epic Life: A Return to Nagy (in Game Studies)

back Roger Travis Parts of this essay have appeared in serialized form on the blog Play the Past. Introduction This essay serves three purposes: first, to review the posts of my Rules of the Text (Travis 2012a-e) series on the blog Play the Past, and to recapitulate their argument and its relation to the two examples that have dominated the series: the fantasy novelfranchise A Song of Ice and… Read more

Donum natalicium

Part II “The Cicadas”

back Yiannis (J.C.B.) Petropoulos In Greece the cicada fills the air every summer with his piercing, reassuring, significant symphony (not haphazard cacophony; the ancients quite cherished his song, and Hesiod in Works and Days 582 ff. clearly discerned its meaning!). Trusty tettix is a midsummer messenger, an angelos of the harvest and other seasonal drudgery crowned by rich reward— (optimally) a heaping cereal crop and grapes galore. In modern… Read more

Donum natalicium

Sky-Blue Flower: Songs of the Bride in Modern Russia and Ancient Greece

back Olga Levaniouk Preface This paper has its roots in a nostalgic recollection: being a graduate student in Greg’s seminar. A discussion of age-related hairstyles in ancient Greece and elsewhere and Greg’s inspiring thoughts on the subject prompted me to put together a handout for a class report with a few Greek and Russian texts side by side. The Russian texts came from the wedding songs I had found… Read more

Donum natalicium

La crise selon l’Iliade

back Pierre Judet de La Combe, EHESS, CNRS Ma dette envers Gregory Nagy est immense. Issue d’une tradition herméneutique littéraire lointainement rattachée à la réflexion théorique de Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, puis refondée par Peter Szondi et surtout par Jean Bollack, la philologie que je pratique est avant tout attentive à la compréhension des œuvres de langage comme individualités historiques et comme événements potentiellement critiques au sein de leur… Read more

Donum natalicium

VINGT ANS POUR ULYSSE, VINGT ANS POUR HÉLÈNE

back Jean Bollack Au chant XXIV de l’Iliade, devant le corps d’Hector, ramené dans sa maison, Hélène fait l’éloge du mort, parlant en tiers avec deux autres femmes, après Hécube, la mère, et Andromaque, l’épouse (voir l’épisode des vers 718-776). Elle ne parle pas en raison de ses liens de parenté, mais comme hors famille, en tant qu’amante de Pâris, et séductrice, qui a été à l’origine de la… Read more

Donum natalicium

Did the Helen of the Homeric Odyssey ever go to Troy?

back Guy Smoot It is my contention that the Homeric Odyssey deliberately problematizes the crucial question of whether Helen went to Troy: it neither clearly asserts it, nor clearly denies it, but leaves a contemporary audience with the hermeneutic freedom to imagine either scenario. The Odyssey positions itself between the Homeric Iliad in which Helen appears to be present at Troy and the tradition first attested in Stesichorus, according… Read more