Plato

Paul Allen Miller

Charles Platter

Plato's account of the famous trial of Socrates in 399 b.c., appeals to historians, philosophers, political scientists, and classicists. It is also essential reading for students of ancient Greek. Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter provide running commentary, glosses of unfamiliar words, introductions that address historical and philosophical issues, and thought-provoking essays on each chapter.

Plato's "Apology" of Socrate

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

The first collection to provide an overview of the well-known psychoanalytic theory of the death drive in literary and cultural theory, this book features contributions from a range of prominent scholars working in the area of literature and psychanalysis.

Philosophy, Literature, Theory

The Death Drive

Barbara K. Gold

Barbara H. Gold

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

The Latin Tradition

Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts

A few years ago globalism seemed to be both a known and inexorable phenomenon. With the end of the Cold War, the opening of the Chinese economy, and the ascendancy of digital technology, the prospect of a unified flow of goods and services and of people and ideas seemed unstoppable. Political theorists such as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that we had reached "the end of history." Yes, there were pockets of resistance and reaction, but these, we were told, would be swept away in a relentless tide of free markets and global integration that would bring Hollywood, digital finance, and fast food to all. Religious fundamentalism, nationalism, and traditional sexual identities would melt away before the forces of "modernity" and empire. A relentless, technocratic rationality would sweep all in its wake, bringing a neoliberal utopia of free markets, free speech, and increasing productivity. Nonetheless, as we have begun to experience the backlash against a global world founded on digital fungibility, the perils of appeals to nationalism, identity, and authenticity have become only too apparent. The collapse of Soviet Communism left an ideological vacuum that offered no recognized place from which to oppose global capitalism. What is the alternative? The anxieties and resentments produced by this new world order among those left behind are often manifested in assertions of xenophobia and particularity. This is what it supposedly means to be really American, truly Muslim, properly Chinese. The "other" is coming to take what is ours, and we must "defend" ourselves. Digitalizing the Global Text is a collection of essays by an international group of scholars situated squarely at this nexus of forces. Together these writers examine how literature, culture, and philosophy in the global and digital age both enable the creation of these simultaneously utopian and dystopian worlds and offer a resistance to them. A joint publication from the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press.

Philosophy, Literature, and Culture

Digitalizing the Global Text

Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness presents a model for studying the history of lyric as a genre. Prof Miller draws a distinction between the work of the Greek lyrists and the more condensed, personal poetry that we associate with lyric. He then confronts the theoretical issues and presents a sophisticated, Bakhtinian reading of the development of the lyric form from its origins in archaic Greece to the more individualist style of Augustan Rome. This book will appeal to classicists and, since English translations of passages from the ancient authors are provided, to those who specialise in comparative literature.

The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome

Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness

Peter I. Barta

Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Paul Allen Miller

David Henry James Larmour

Russian Literature and the Classics attempts to fill a gap. To date there has been no book-length, systematic study of the impact of antiquity on Russian literature and culture. While by no means claiming to offer a comprehensive approach, the authors focus on various aspects of the influence which the Classics have had on Russian literature at particularly significant junctures - the beginning of the nineteenth century; the age of the great Russian realist novel; the "Silver Age"; Stalin's terror; the "Thaw" after 1956; and the period just before the collapse of Soviet society. In their introductory essay the editors offer an overview of the Classical Tradition. In it, they provide an insight into the contrasting ways in which that tradition manifested itself in the literature of Western Europe and of Russia.

Russian Literature and the Classics

A wide variety of texts by the Latin satirists are presented here in a fully loaded resource to provide an innovative reading of satire's relation to Roman ideology. Brimming with notes, commentaries, essays and texts in translation, this book succeeds in its mission to help the student understand the history of Latin's modern scholarly reception. Focusing on the linguistic difficulties and problems of usage, and examining aspects of meter and style necessary for poetry appreciation, the commentary places each selection in its own historical context then using essays and critical excerpt, the genre's most salient features are elucidated to provide a further understanding of its place in history. Extremely student friendly, this stands well both as a companion to Latin Erotic Elegy and in its own right as an invaluable fund of knowledge for any Latin literature scholar.

An Anthology and Reader

Latin Verse Satire

Perhaps no classical writer has been so consistently in vogue as Horace. Famous in his own lifetime as a close associate of the Emperor Octavian, to whom he dedicated several odes, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC) has never really been out of fashion. Petrarch, for example, modelled his letters on Horace's innovative Epistles, while also borrowing from his Roman forebear in composing his own Italian sonnets. The echo of Horace's voice can be found in almost every genre of medieval literature. And in later periods, this influence and popularity if anything increased. Yet, as Paul Allen Miller shows, while Horace may justifiably be called the poet for all seasons he is also in the end an enigma. His elusive, ironic contrariness is perhaps the true secret of his success. A cultured man of letters, he fought on the losing side of the Battle of Philippi (42 BC). A staunch Republican, he ended up eagerly (some said too eagerly) promoting the cause of Julio-Claudian imperialism. Viewed as the acme of Roman literary civilization, he was shaped by his Athens education at Plato's famous Academy. This new introduction reveals Horace in all his paradoxical genius and complexity.

Horace

The significance of Plato’s Apology of Socrates is impossible to overestimate. An account of the famous trial of Socrates in 399 b.c., it appeals to historians, philosophers, political scientists, classicists, and literary critics. It is also essential reading for students of ancient Greek. This new commentary on Plato’s canonical work is designed to accommodate the needs of students in intermediate-level Greek classes, where they typically encounter the Apology for the first time. Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter, two highly respected classicists and veteran instructors, present the Apology in its traditional thirty-three-chapter structure. They amplify the text with running commentary and glosses of unfamiliar words at the bottom of each page; brief chapter introductions to relevant philosophical, historical, and rhetorical issues; and a separate series of thought-provoking essays, one on each chapter. The essays can serve as bases for class discussions or as starting points for paper topics or general reflection. By integrating background material into the text at regular intervals rather than front-loading it in a lengthy initial overview or burying it in back-of-the-book endnotes, the authors offer students a rich encounter with the text. Their commentary incorporates the latest research on both the trial of Socrates and Plato’s version of it, and it engages major philosophical issues from a contemporary perspective. This book is not only a much-needed aid for students of Greek. It is also the basis of a complete course on the Apology.

A Commentary

Plato's Apology of Socrates

Paul Allen, Hrsg.] Miller

Miller offers a complete course on the Latin erotic elegists, helping to trace the genre's rise and fall, and to understand its relation to the changes that marked the collapse of the Roman republic and the founding of the empire.

Latin Erotic Elegy

This indispensable volume provides a complete course on Latin erotic elegy, allowing students to trace a coherent narrative of the genre's rise and fall, and to understand its relationship to the changes that marked the collapse of the Roman republic, and the founding of the empire. The book begins with a detailed and wide-ranging introduction, looking at major figures, the evolution of the form, and the Roman context, with particular focus on the changing relations between the sexes. The texts that follow range from the earliest manifestations of erotic elegy, in Catullus, through Tibullus, Sulpicia (Rome's only female elegist), Propertius and Ovid. An accessible commentary explores the historical background, issues of language and style, and the relation of each piece to its author's larger body of work. The volume closes with an anthology of critical essays representative of the main trends in scholarship; these both illuminate the genre's most salient features and help the student understand its modern reception.

David Shepherd

It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term. Arising from a conference under the same title held at Texas Tech University, Carnivalizing Difference seeks to explore the actual and possible relationships between Bakhtinian theory and cultural practice. The introduction explores the changing configurations of our understanding of Bakhtin's work in the context of recent theory and outlines how that understanding can inform, and be informed by, culture both ancient and modern. Eleven articles, spanning a wide range of periods and cultural forms, then address these issues in detail, revealing the ways in which Bakhtinian thought illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but always challenges.

Bakhtin and the Other

Carnivalizing Difference

David H.J. Larmour

In this collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's famous work presents a bold theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times, and yet until now it has remained under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. By bringing together the historical knowledge, philological skills, and theoretical perspectives of a wide range of scholars, this collection enables the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome. Not only do the essays bring to light the assumptions, ideas, and practices that constituted the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world, but they also demonstrate the importance of the History of Sexuality for fields as diverse as Greco-Roman antiquity, women's history, cultural studies, philosophy, and modern sexuality. The essays include "Situating The History of Sexuality" (the editors), "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" (Joel Black), "Incipit Philosophia" (Alain Vizier), "The Subject in Antiquity after Foucault" (Page duBois), "This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato's Symposium" (Jeffrey S. Carnes), "Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?" (Amy Richlin), "Catullan Consciousness, the 'Care of the Self,' and the Force of the Negative in History" (Paul Allen Miller), "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius' Satyricon" (Daniel B. McGlathery), and an essay from Dislocating Masculinity (Lin Foxhall).

Foucault and Classical Antiquity

Rethinking Sexuality

In a collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault and his HISTORY OF SEXUALITY on the study of classics. The essays bring to light the nature of the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world--and demonstrate the importance of the HISTORY OF SEXUALITY for other fields of study, such as women's history, modern sexuality, and more. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

"Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy's self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought." "On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology's own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenchaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages." "A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers' contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism's chief thinkers' debts to Plato and the ancient world."--BOOK JACKET.

Paul Allen Miller

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