Poetics Of Empire Research Articles

Poetics of Empire in the Literature of the Early Principate

В статье рассматриваются содержание и особенности имперского дискурса в сочинениях поэтов Августова века. Показано восприятие римскими авторами имперского пространства как этнически разнородного и в то же время универсального, охватывающего весь населенный мир и подвластного Риму и единой власти принцепса. Выявляются представления поэтов об особой имперской миссии Рима, характере Pax Romana. Делается вывод о том, что имперские реалии были глубинной основой мировосприятия августовских поэтов, являвшихся безусловными адептами римского империализма, который нашел в их творчестве мощное образное (а у Вергилия, можно сказать, и теоретическое) воплощение, став мифом, формировавшим римскую имперскую идентичность.

Pliny/Trajan and the Poetics of Empire

Previous articleNext article No AccessPliny/Trajan and the Poetics of EmpireGreg WoolfGreg WoolfThe Institute of Classical Studies, London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 110, Number 2April 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/680669 Views: 552Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref [© 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alice König, Rebecca Langlands, James Uden Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235, 2 (Apr 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108637336Tom Keeline, Tyler Kirby Auceps syllabarum : A Digital Analysis of Latin Prose Rhythm, Journal of Roman Studies 109 (Sep 2019): 161–204.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000881Jacek Hajduk Pliny the Younger and the Art of Narration, Classica Cracoviensia 21 (Jul 2019): 55–70.https://doi.org/10.12797/CC.21.2018.21.03 Kyungjoo Ko 속주 총독과 로마제국의 속주 행정 : 소 플리니우스의 『서한집』 제10권을 중심으로, The Journal of Classical Studies null, no.5353 (Dec 2018): 137–182.https://doi.org/10.20975/jcskor.2018..53.137 이지은 Ideal and Reality of Provincial Administration in Pliny’s Letters Book 10, The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies 57, no.11 (Mar 2018): 165–195.https://doi.org/10.23933/jgrs.2018.57.1.165 이지은 review: Roy K. Gibson and Ruth Morello, Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction, The Journal of Classical Studies null, no.4242 (Sep 2015): 213–222.https://doi.org/10.20975/jcskor.2015..42.213

Nietzsche Apostle

Nietzsche Apostle

Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism by Tim Whitmarsh

BOOK REVIEWS Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. By TIM WHITMARSH. Berkeleyand LosAngeles: UniversityofCalifornia Press, 2013. Pp. xiii +278. Hardcover, $49.95. ISBN 978-0-520-27681-9. hitmarsh’s Goodwin Award-winning “Adventures” lives up to its title: itisindeedasafariintosomewildandwoollyterritory,includingforays intosomeoftheleastcanonicaltextsinanacademicfield—Classics— oftenobsessedwith canonicity.Even the first paragraph includes a shot acrossthe bow: for Whitmarsh, the notion of postclassicism requires us to “rethink classicist categories inherited from the nineteenth century” (1). Thus what might seem a book geared towards contemporary reception—“beyond” in terms of chronology —is really “beyond” in terms of ideology: how (and why) we’ve structured periods of the ancient world so that they seem to flow ineluctably from the previous to the next. For Whitmarsh, one consequence of this sort of macronarrative is a marginalization (almostliteral,here)ofalternativevoicesandliteratures:Jews,Christians, Egyptians, and “bad” (or to put it more economically, under-valued) poets. Indeed , Whitmarsh sees in poetry a more valuable entrance to politics than even prose:inpoetry,thehoarytropesof“antiquity”areredeployedtocunningeffectas poetsrenegotiate, though “traditional” verse, their power and privilege under new regimes. One value—though not necessarily the value—of studying the so-called Second Sophistic is thus to upend previously established “hierarchies of cultural value” (6) and to rethink how we periodize antiquityinto neatcategories and into more(orless!)privilegedauthors.Whitmarshasksus,rather,tosuspendinherited prejudicesand to investigate,with fresh eyes, these upstart artistsof 50 to 300 CE. Of the fifteen essays that comprise the volume, ten are previously published (and here revised), but all contribute to Whitmarsh’s overarching aim: to treat SecondSophisticthinkersasphilosophersofacontestedpastandanuncertainfuture . The book itself is divided into three general arcs: on fiction and fictionality (particularly as touching upon Greek prose); on the cultural significance of both prose and poetry in changed political circumstances; and, in “Beyond the Second W 236 BOOK REVIEWS Sophistic,” on the cultural poetics of Ezekiel’s Exagoge and on specifically Jewish receptionsofprevious Greek literature. Whitmarsh’stourthroughfictionalitybeginswith“TheInventionofFiction,” a sustained critique of teleological accounts of the Imperial Greek novel. (Teleologyisoften thewhipping-boyofthisstudy.)Whitmarsh particularlytargetsnarratives that privilege the importance of Hellenistic fiction over later Roman cultural considerations and which likewise over-emphasize the Greek-ness of the novel at the expense of non-Greek influences. Subsequent chapters variously examine the consequences of Whitmarsh’s will-to-demolish, including a reconsideration of the narrative worlds of the socalled “Romances”(chapter2);theinterplayoftheology,historicity,andfictionality in EuhemerusofMessene’sSacred Inscription (chapter 3);and complementary accountsof the literary“I” and Lucius’ Ass (chapters 4 and 5). (This last featuresa terrific précis of actor and auctor, adapted from Winkler’s ground-breaking narratological study of Apuleius (81–82)). Devotés of now-popular Philostratus will want to consult Whitmarsh’s chapter on Heroicus, which interweaves considerations of cultural identity with geography, genre (i.e. the mise en scene is “superpastoral ” (108)),and, ofcourse, fictionality. Whitmarsh’smiddlesection,“PoetryandProse,”examinestheinterplayofall things Greek and Roman, and his insightful, incisive chapter nine, on the Greek epigram,isamodelofitstype.Atfirstitseemstobetravelingalongwell-wornpaths in its analysis of epigram as an essential component of the Roman system of patronage : poetry as potlatch. But it is a virtue of Whitmarsh’s scholarship that he states exactly what he’s arguing against, in this case both (1) a Bundy-influenced interpretationin whicheveryaspectofa poem contributesto the praiseof the laudandusand (2)deconstructiveinterpretations(à la Newlands)thatemphasizerather the elements of covert criticism (148).1 For Whitmarsh, both schools of interpretation ultimately flatten the complexity of Greek epigram, which triangulates as well the element of the consuming Greco-Roman public. In this way, it is (paradoxically) a public display of private gift-giving and thus a commentary on the relationship between Greek artists and Roman colonizers: who is really “gifting ”culture towhom? Epigramsforclose-readingincludeAntipater2,Crinagoras 24, and the extremely weird Diodorus 1 (with its odd description of the “city of 1 Specifically cited in this context is Carole Newlands, Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. BOOK REVIEWS 237 Remus”); the chapter thus exemplifies Whitmarsh’s style, which ricochets betweencomplextheoreticalconstructsanddetailedreadingsofindividualpassages . The final arc of the study, on Ezekiel’s Exagoge, and on Jewish writers grappling with Greek myth, makes good on the author’s promise to consider Greek literaryhistoryfromneglectedviewpoints;inparticular,Whitmarsh’sexamination of the fragmentary Hellenistic Greek...

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry by Marshall Brown

Marshall Brown. The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Pp. 384. $75.00 cloth/$35.00 paper. Che impensata novita! exclaim the enraged posse of characters in pursuit of Don Giovanni, when they discover Leperello in his master's guise. What a totally unexpected thing! Beset by mille torbidi pensieri, the characters reel, knocked silly. But what truly unexpected, from the Don's point of view, the behavior of everyone else in the opera. From the opening scene, when he grappled with by Donna Anna--e sono assalitrice d'assalita! she later boasts--everyone off script, refusing their roles. Of course, he persists with the old routines the end, deaf the realignment of desire and language occurring around him. Not. doesn't always mean in Don Giovanni, but as Marshall Brown brilliantly adduces in the concluding chapter of his new book, it the opera's signature utterance, along with two other epithets of the modern: sentire (to feel) and battere (to beat/fight), the latter originated by Giovanni and Anna's deadlocked struggle, but which signifies also, Brown suggests, the restless beat of Mozart's music, and the momentous historical change both the Don and Mozart's Prague audience of 1787 must be made hear (Viva la Liberta!). The skeptical energy that pulses through Mozart's Don Giovanni marks a fitting (actually rousing) conclusion Brown's The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul, a book concerned throughout with facets of skeptical artistry (37) in music and poetry. Abstraction Brown's master term for the negativity that characterizes music and lyric poetry: how both art forms operate upon a deficit of meaning and thus are always pointing the pure necessity and energy of form. The introductory chapter includes a tour of modernist painting--Picasso, Rothko--before concluding that abstraction is a mode, not a period (14) and setting sail for the long eighteenth century. In Brown's hierarchy of arts, the abstraction or immateriality of music the condition which poetry aspires. In Faure's song Rencontre, for example--Brown's reading of which sets the terms for much of what follow--the lyric does not succeed in rescuing the music from abstraction. Rather, Faure's setting introduces a vital indeterminacy, and thus emotional depth, otherwise bland verse. In this way, the lyric art, written, sung, or played, represents an essential musicalization of experience (xi). All arts are one. In chapter two, the oft-derided subcategory of becomes the name for this principle of abstraction, a contrarian move characteristic of the skeptical sensibility Brown brings Romantic definitions of art. not license (44), even less an unbounded state of mind, but rather an achieved affect dependent on craft. Like the Mephistophelean no coursing through Don Giovanni, fantasy a questioning presence audible not only in custom-made settings such as Mendelssohn's Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream, but in such sublime edifices as Beethoven's Fifth. Fantasy Brown's name for that symphony's incomplete catharsis, its lack of a statement form shore up against the restlessness of a pulse (60). Brown's close analyses of momentary musical effects enacts the difficult rescue of music from ideology, linking it to a different kind of meaning that might rescue society from the tyranny of its principles (62). In a later chapter, Brown reiterates the point in a reading of Dickinson, whose empirical poetics of our phantasmic sense-world communicate their spirit the book (as well as its toothsome title): Poetry's estrangements are not transcendence. Rather, they are antiphonal the hymnic strains that regulate belief systems (98). In such moments as these, the very considerable stakes of Brown's enterprise become clear, as well as the specific powers of an interdisciplinary approach that takes music, not text, as the model of art. …

ORIENTALISM REVERSED: RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE TIMES OF EMPIRES

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback version 2005; first edition 1994)Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)In the last decades of the Russian Empire, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made for favorite reading among the intelligentsia. Today imperial themes have become increasingly important in American academia; historians and literary scholars who study Russia are no exception. The two studies under review explore the spirit and the letter of the Russian Empire in the moment of boom and glory preceding its collapse. Published in 1994, Susan Layton's Russian Literature and Empire was the pioneering study of the subject. Published in 2003, Harsha Ram's The Imperial Sublime is so different from Layton's book that the differences, rooted in the American rather than the Russian imperial experience, deserve reflection in their own right. While Layton looked at the world through the emancipatory optic of postcolonialist and feminist movements, Ram manifests a different kind of sensibility, one which is alert to the scale and beauty of the victorious power. In a sad but understandable way, Susan Layton's ethical concerns give way to Harsha Ram's aesthetic ones.

The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840 - the century during which poets defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.

Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story

Once more into the forest Learning the ropes of preclosure Preclosing an open story Stages of preclosure and the history of the American short story Preclosure in issue-bound stories Everybody (?) loves Raymond Carver Currents in a still pond Minimalism and social history The short story and its non-fiction counterpart.

Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, & Culture in the Short Story (review)

Reviewed by: Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, & Culture in the Short Story Thomas P. Adler Susan Lohafer . Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, & Culture in the Short Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. 194 pp. Among the spate of books on short story theory that have appeared in the twenty years since John Gerlach's Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story (1985), Susan Lohafer's recent entry in the field must count, at first glance, as one of the quirkiest. In Reading for Storyness, Lohafer is responding against what she sees as the "excesses of contemporary criticism" (127) that "map [cultural] issues onto a text" (92) and thereby threaten to reduce short fiction's power and appeal by pre-imposing ideology and privileging social relevance. Predisposed to New Criticism and Formalism, Lohafer desires to rescue literary study of an art form that she values for its unique ability to pack a lot into little. In order to accomplish this, she distinguishes herself from reader-response theorists who depend upon "informed" audiences schooled in an "elite aesthetics" and proposes instead a "literary empiricism" that, rather than deconstruct stories, will deconstruct readers and their habits of academic reading (143). Borrowing from textual linguists, discourse analysts like Teun A. Van Dijk with his notions of macrostructure and superstructure, and cognitive scientists such as William F. Brewer who "anatomize" (133) the creation of narratives to explain behavior as well as study how the mind processes literature, Lohafer develops a data-driven methodology that puts the spreadsheet onto the literary scholar's desk and into her classrooms. While admitting that the "immanence of the end" has always been "the undisputed genre marker" (146) that distinguishes the short story from other fictional narratives, Lohafer argues that when processing a text readers not only arrive at final or end closure but [End Page 249] also, if "left to their own devices," identify a series of what she terms preclosure moments at which the story might have ended but did not; in other words, their habit of mind is to "chunk" the story into several discrete parts that display a kind of completeness in themselves (33). So each story embeds within itself a succession of still shorter stories. The preclosure points ending those "putative" stories will be signaled in the text by certain "markers" (52), such as "paragraph breaks, changes of space/time/condition, natural-event terminals, and image recursions" (27). Moreover, each of these stories-within-the-story can be classified as belonging to a specific subgenre. For her data, Lohafer draws upon anywhere from one reader (herself) or a group of four acquaintances (none of whom turn out to really like the story they read) to as many as 180 students studying the same story. In some instances, she will cluster her sample respondents by delineating various profiles they exhibit in order to determine what differences emerge by gender; or by level of experience/education; or by how they code the importance of what she somewhat vaguely terms relationships, ideas about reality, patterns or models, and spiritual frames of reference, resulting in categories "p," "i," "m," and "s" plus a number designating relative weight. What results is a deliberately anti-elitist way of reading, then, that honors interpretive plurality while refusing to privilege those who are theoretically knowledgeable, opting instead for the abilities of the Woolfian common reader. Employing this approach, Lohafer examines in detail ten works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kate Chopin, Julio Cortezar, Katherine Mansfield, Sandra Cisneros, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Bobbie Ann Mason, pinpointing as many as eleven different generic chunks within a single story. Carver's "Cathedral" and Mason's "Shiloh" each proceed through six subgenres, not always consistently named: initiation story, recognition, epiphanic tale, confession, moral coming-of-age story, and revelation story in the former; a slice-of-life story, dawn-of-recognition story, genre (love-interest) story, message (women's liberation) story, sociographic story, and postmodern story in the latter. Beattie's "Weekend" is found to exhibit a grand total of eleven such generic types as it moves toward final closure: inverted fairy tale, existential parable, epiphany story, relationship story, open...

Carole E. Newlands: Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire

Carole E. Newlands: Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2002. 356 S. 45 £.

Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story by Susan Lohafer

Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story by Susan Lohafer

The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire by Harsha s> Ram (review)

REVIEWS 515 early in the nineteenth century. Lyricpoetry subsequentlyfocused on themes ratherthan genres. There is only one remarkabout folkpoetry (p. I7). Indeed, Wachtelwrites that 'Before the eighteenth century, Russia had no viable secular literature' (p. 65). Why then did Pushkinand his contemporariesassiduouslyrecord the folk song tradition? Perhaps this blind spot explains the author's failure to highlightthe essentiallyoral qualityof Russianverse of the past two centuries. As he well knows, educated Russiansdo not merely read poetry. They recite it spontaneously,without referenceto printedmaterials,hence the high levelsof intertextualitythatpervadethe Russianpoetry tradition. The brief discussion of intertextuality itself brings to light some telling connections, such as echoes in Akhmatova of Pushkin, in Sosnora of Derzhavin, in Prigov of Pasternakand in Iskrenkoof Okudzhava (pp. 50-57 and passim). Readers new to Russian poetry might have been offered many more examplesof thistrulysignificantand characteristicphenomenon. The value of thisbook asan 'introduction'to itssubjectmustbe questioned. Despite suggestionsthat it is accessibleto studentswith only a year of Russian (p. ix), it assumes automatically that those same students are sophisticated readers of poetry. Even relatively advanced undergraduateswould find the welterof informationdaunting.ThirtyormoreRussianpoets fromTrediakovskii to Kibirov are briefly quoted each along with an English prose equivalent and several other Russian poets and novelists are mentioned. More than a dozen West European and classical poets, as well as several philosophers,composersand paintersfeaturein the exposition. My own preference would have been a larger number of substantial discussionsof a small range of lyricalmasterpiecesalong the lines of the love poetry Pushkin's'Ia vas liubil . . .', Akhmatova's'Ia ne liubvi tvoei proshu ... ' and Tsvetaeva's 'Popytkarevnosti'(pp. 96-IO9) of a selection of wellknown landscape poems and of an equivalent group of patriotic lyrics (PP. 110-45). Aside from these groups, no other single poem, even the shortest, is here given its due. Too often the discussionveers off into asides. There is a sense that the book is trying to cover too many issues in too few words or, at the very least, that the extensive section headed 'Interpretation' (pp. 65-145) shouldhave yielded space to the 'Concepts'section (pp. 15-62). Baratynskiiabove all is given shortshrift:this is strangefor a poet who almost invariablystrikesa chordwith young people. Strangely,this CambridgeUniversityPressimprintiswrittenexclusivelyin American English (spelling,punctuation, vocabulary and culturalreferences such as King Kong and AbrahamLincoln). 7The UniversityofAuckland IAN K. LILLY Ram, Harsha. TheImperial Sublime. A RussianPoetics ofEmpire. Publicationsof the Wisconsin Center for PushkinStudies. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2003. x + 307 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. THE establishmentof empire and the creation of a poetic idiom in eighteenthcentury Russia were almost simultaneousdevelopments. It is the relationship 5I6 SEER, 83, 3, 2005 between these developments, togetherwith the subsequentinterplaybetween imperial politics and poetics, that Harsha Ram explores in this stimulating monograph. Ram is concerned with what he terms 'the imperial sublime' from its eighteenth-century origins to the death of Lermontov in I84I and with the genres (firstthe ode, and laterthe elegy)which servedas theprincipalvehicles for the expression of the sublime. He begins with an examination of theories of the sublime and with definitionof varioustypes of the sublime,referringto classicformulationsof the notion by Longinus,Boileau, EdmundBurke,Kant and Hegel. He also has to consider the oriental theme in Russian literature. For representationof Russia as a European empire (theproject to which the strivingfor the sublimewas harnessed)entailed orientalization,in the Russian mentallandscape,of the southernlandsoverwhich Russiawasgainingcontrol in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ram then retracesthe origins of modern Russian literature,providing some usefulpages on Simeon Polotskii and Baroque panegyric oratory before discussing the emergence of the ceremonial ode, the poetic and linguistic revolution effected by Lomonosov, and the use made of the ode by Lomonosov and Derzhavin. Moving on to the Alexandrine and early Nicholaevan periods, and paying particularattention to Griboedov and Kuchelbecker, Ram characterizes the vision of the Decembristsasboth a revivalanda reversalof theeighteenth-centurysublime. This vision, while insurrectionary,he argues, retained 'empire as one of the definingcontexts of [... .] civic engagement' (p. 8), thus combining 'alienated dissent'with 'imperialtriumphalism'(p. I59). Next, in a chapteron 'Pushkin, Lermontov, and the elegiac sublime', Ram offersclose readings of Pushkin's 'Prophet' and his narrative poem 'The Prisoner of the Caucasus' and of a number of Lermontov's Caucasian poems, especially...

The imperial sublime: a Russian poetics of empire

The imperial sublime: a Russian poetics of empire

The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire by Harsha Ram (review)

The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire by Harsha Ram (review)

The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. By Harsha Ram. Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. x, 307 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95, hard bound.

The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. By Harsha Ram. Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. x, 307 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95, hard bound.

Reading for storyness: preclosure theory, empirical poetics, and culture in the short story

Reading for storyness: preclosure theory, empirical poetics, and culture in the short story

The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in La Araucana and Os Lusiadas

The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in La Araucana and Os Lusiadas

Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire

1London Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire Carole E.Newlands viii + 356Cambridge, New York, OakleighCambridge University Press 2002£45.00 0 521 80891 X

Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire

1London Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire Carole E.Newlands viii + 356Cambridge, New York, OakleighCambridge University Press 2002£45.00 0 521 80891 X