The Center for Hellenic Studies

rhetoric

Curated Articles

Foreword to Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, by Nicole Loraux. Trans. Selina Stewart. Cornell University Press, 2000.

[In this online version, the original page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{vii|viii}” indicates where p. vii of the printed version ends and p. viii begins.] This new book by Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth : Myth and Politics in Athens, [1] is a sequel to The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the… Read more

Curated Articles

The Pygmies in the Cage: The Function of the Sublime in Longinus

[[This essay was originally published in Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (eds. D. Heiland and L. J. Rosenthal).]] In memory of Robert F. Goheen The editors of the volume have posed powerful questions, ones that go to the heart of the experience of reading and teaching literature. Are those experiences so “sublime” that they are beyond systematic analysis? Are they “ineffable?” The author of the ancient… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective

The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft studies Homeric performance from archaic to Roman imperial times. It argues that oracular utterance, dramatic acting, and rhetorical delivery powerfully elucidate the practice of epic rhapsodes. Attention to the ways in which these performance domains informed each other over time reveals a shifting dynamic of competition and emulation among rhapsodes, actors, and orators that shaped their texts and their crafts. A diachronic analysis of this… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers

The Theory and Practice of Life is a study of the literary culture within which the works, schools, and careers of Plato, Aristotle, and contemporary Greek intellectuals took shape. It focuses on the important role played by their rival Isocrates and the rhetorical education offered in his school. Tarik Wareh shows that when Aristotle illustrates his ethical theory by reference to the practical arts, this is no simple appeal to a homespun commonsense… Read more

News, Publications

Online Publication of GENOS DIKANIKON: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens, by Victor Bers

The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce that the online edition of Victor Bers’ GENOS DIKANIKON: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens is now available on the CHS website (chs.harvard.edu). In this monograph Victor Bers attempts to show that many features of Athenian court speech in the deluxe form we know from the preserved speeches were fashioned to avoid the failings of amateur… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Pindar’s Verbal Art: An Ethnographic Study of Epinician Style

In Pindar’s Verbal Art, James Bradley Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. This is the first study of Pindar’s language that applies performance as a method for the ethnographic description and interpretation of entextualized records of verbal art. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, Pindar’s Verbal Art is a sociological stylistics… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel

This work offers the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of the poetics of the twelfth-century medieval Greek novel. This book investigates the complex ways in which rhetorical theory and practice constructed the overarching cultural aesthetics that conditioned the production and reception of the genre of the novel in twelfth-century Byzantine society. By examining the indigenous rhetorical concept of amphoteroglossia, this book probes unexplored aspects of the re-inscription of inherited allegorical,… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics

Epic is not only a nostalgic memory of a remote past, but also, as performance, a deliberate act in the present. In fact, as this book argues, memory is itself a deliberate act when it is turned into epic language. With numerous fresh linguistic observations, Egbert Bakker shows that the epic narrator makes the epic past come to the present: epic is not only a verbal artifact that points to the past;… Read more