2016
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Tuesday, December 6, 2016 Basic Intensive Latin - Informational Meeting for Students
Olin 306 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Thursday, November 10, 2016 The Hermeneutics of "God-Talk":
Dr. Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw VevainaThe Case of Zoroastrianism Yarshater Assistant Professor of Avestan and Pahlavi at the University of Toronto Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This conversation, moderated by Shai Secunda (Religion), will probe the efforts of Zoroastrian theologians to make sense of their ancient Iranian tradition; the distinction between theology and critical scholarship in the study of Zoroastrianism; and the sociology of knowledge in a field where Orientalism, minority identity, and related factors collide. Participants are strongly encouraged to read Dr. Vevaina's article “Theologies and Hermeneutics,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015), 211-234, in advance. Contact Shai Secunda for a pdf of the article. |
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Thursday, November 3, 2016 “Not to be born is best.” Greek Pessimism revisited or: Was Nietzsche right?
Professor Michael Lurie, Dartmouth CollegeRKC 103 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 It is a characteristic of contemporary Western culture that we are constantly told that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that we are commanded to be happy. What if our modern obsession with happiness is a tragic delusion? What if we were not born to be happy at all? What if it would be by far the best for each one of us never to have been born? Is there more to life than being happy? The gloomy, paradoxical notion that it would be by far the best for us not to be born played a crucial role in the daring, and explicitly anti-modernist, visions of pre-Platonic Greek culture advanced in the late 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, but has been largely neglected ever since. In this lecture, we will look at the dark view of the world and man’s place in it that emerges from Greek pre-Platonic literature and thought and try to understand why modernity has always struggled to come to terms with it. |
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Tuesday, October 25, 2016 The Modernist Literary Experiment: Focus on Joyce
David Vichnar, PhD, Charles University PragueOLIN LC 208 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In what is one of the most thoughtful definitions of the entire movement, art critic Clement Greenberg thought the dominant trait of modernism to be "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself". The talk proposes to test this definition on the work of James Joyce and cover the development of his linguistic poetics, tracing his treatment of language as material from Dubliners via A Portrait and Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. |
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Thursday, May 5, 2016 PEEP!
student curated short-film screenings inspired by PEEP cinemaPreston 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Students Grace Calderly and Lian Ladia curate a selection of short films focused on "the insider looking or in" and the return of the gaze in the idea of peep cinema. This film program is the students final project for Curating Cinema at CCS Bard. |
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Tuesday, April 26, 2016 The Virtues of Violence: Amphitheatres, Gladiators, and the Roman System of Values
Kathleen Coleman, James Loeb Professor of the Classics, Harvard UniversityReem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Professor Coleman, James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, is a distinguished teacher and scholar of Latin literature, especially Flavian poetry; the history and culture of the early Empire; Roman arena spectacles; and Roman punishment. As well as serving as a former President of the American Philological Association, chair of the Harvard Department of the Classics, and editor of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Professor Coleman has published widely on topics ranging from Roman graffiti to Hollywood’s presentation of gladiatorial spectacle. Current projects include preparing the manuscript of her 2010 Jerome Lectures for the University of Michigan Press, entitled "Q. Sulpicius Maximus, Poet, Eleven Years Old;” she is also working on book-length projects about Roman public execution and arena spectacles, the topic of her lecture today. |
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Monday, April 18, 2016 Reassessing the Athenian Empire
David RosenbloomOlin Humanities, Room 205 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Was Athens the benevolent savior of Greece eventually corrupted by a half century of dominance? Do documentary inscriptions offer a vantage point on Athenian imperialism free from rhetoric and ideology? Is imperialism a linguistic practice? Starting from an appraisal of Ian Morris’ recent contention that the Athenian empire was not an empire because it failed to meet minimum qualitative and quantitative thresholds, this talk examines recurring assumptions and arguments in the historiography of the Athenian empire, suggesting that historians of the empire, while earnestly attempting to apply empiricist principles, have mainly succeeded in writing Athenian hegemonic ideology as history. |
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Tuesday, February 16, 2016 Shepherds Astray in Tragedy and Epic
a lecture by Julia ScarboroughOlin LC 208 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Why do Virgil’s shepherds stop singing and start killing? In his heroic epic, the Aeneid, we might expect the poet to leave behind the pastoral world of his Eclogues, where peaceful shepherds devote themselves to song. Instead, at crucial junctures, shepherds enter the action – with catastrophic results, culminating in war between Aeneas’ Trojans and the Italians with whom they are fated to merge in a new Roman nation. The clash of pastoral and epic has troubled both ancient and modern critics. Does Virgil simply not know how to start an epic war? Are the Italian shepherds innocent victims of an imperialist invasion, or are they violent rustics in need of civilizing leadership? I argue that the key to understanding the role of pastoral in the epic is recognizing a third genre at work: tragedy. Shepherds in Attic tragedy bring disruption onto the stage; their good intentions combined with inexperience make them dangerous. This role offers a paradigm for the part played by shepherds in the Aeneid – including the poem’s most important shepherd: Aeneas himself. Invoking tensions inherent in the figure of the shepherd in tragedy, Virgil transforms the Homeric metaphor of the hero as shepherd of his people to explore the tragic ironies in which Aeneas is implicated as he struggles to fulfill his destiny. |
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Thursday, February 11, 2016 The Song of Ismenias and the Tragic Destruction of Thebes
a lecture by Jacqueline Michelle Arthur-MontagneOlin LC 208 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5 The destruction of the city of Thebes by Alexander the Great in the Greek Alexander Romance is unlike any other account of the event in ancient histories. In the fictional Romance, Alexander engages in a sophistic debate with the flute-player Ismenias on whether the Thebes of the tragic imagination should be preserved. In this presentation, Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne will investigate how this debate reflects on the value and vitality of Athenian tragedy in Imperial Greece, and why prose fiction becomes the genre in which this tragic legacy is contested. |
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Monday, February 8, 2016 NOTE: New location | The End of Exoticism in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica Olin Humanities, Room 205 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5 NOTE: New location Griffins, giraffes, giants, and gymnosophists (naked sages): these are just a few features of the exoticism on display in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story (Aethiopica, written 3rd/4th century CE). The latest, longest, and grandest of the Greek novels, the Aethiopica has won many fans, from the renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano to Racine to Cervantes. Heliodorus’ narrative shows us how the literary horizons of the Roman empire ignited a very particular Greek fictional imaginary about the edges of the earth, and, long before the likes of Said, it leads us to the heart of an exoticizing ethnographic discourse and a discussion of cultural difference. Focusing on the narrative of the tenth and final book of the Aethiopica, I argue that this book represents both the heights of the genre’s exoticism and also, paradoxically, its undoing. The conclusion of the novel, I propose, marks an end in more than one sense, completing a ritual, completing a narrative, and, in a way, completing a genre by transforming its paradigms. As this novel traverses—and writes—the Mediterranean world, I show that it constructs the identity of humans, cultures, and genres, all the while creating social, cultural, and literary networks in the Roman imperial period. |