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Stage and Stadium: Drama and Athletics in Classical Greece

Nikephoros, Supplement 4

Hildesheim: Weidmann 1999, X/227 pages

                       


This book is a study of the relationship between Greek athletics and Greek drama. It starts from the proposition that these two phenomena are more closely connected in Greek culture than we have traditionally assumed, and argues that each throws significant light upon the other. It examines the "athletic" features of Greek drama, as exemplified by the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and the "dramatic" features of Greek athletic events at the major Panhellenic festivals.

The competitive, or "agonistic", character of both athletic and dramatic activities is explained in terms of the cultural ideology of the Greek city-state, in which patriarchal male power rests upon a hierarchy of social and economic classes, and upon domination by the Greek freeborn male of the Other, that is, foreigners, slaves and women.

The book situates its investigation of the "athletic" in drama and the "dramatic" in athletics in the context of current interest in sports as theatrical displays. It makes use of the semiotic methodology of Roland Barthes and on occasion draws upon the insights of structuralist and deconstructive approaches.

Contents:

1. Festivals and Events

2. Agon

3. Athletes and Agones on Stage

4. Athletics in Drama

5. Drama in Athletics

Appendices (Survey of Greek Festivals with athletic, musical and dramatic agones)

Bibliography

Index

Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity            

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997

Edited by David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter

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).

Lucian's Science Fiction Novel True Histories: Interpretation and Commentary 

(Mnemosyne, Bibliotheca Classica Batava. Supplementum, No 179)

Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing 1998

by Aristoula Georgiadou and David H. J. Larmour

Contents:

Introduction

I. Truth and Falsehood
1. Lucian
2. Dio and Celsus
II. Allegory and the Journey for Knowledge
1. Homer and the Allegorical Tradition
2. Numenius of Apamea
3. Journeys for Knowledge
III. Parody and Allusion
1. Poetry
2. Historiography and Story-telling
3. Philosophy
IV. The Verae Historiae, Satire and Science Fiction

Commentary

1. A Trip to the Moon
2. Inside the Whale
3. The Land of the Dead

Bibliography
General Index
Index of Greek Words 

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose

Edited by: David H. J. Larmour

London: Routledge, 2002

Contents:

Introduction: 'Collusion and Collision', David H. J. Larmour 

1. The Artist and Ideology: 

Galya Diment, The Nabokov-Wilson Debate: Art versus Social and Moral Responsibility

 Brian Walter, Two Organ-Grinders: Duality and Discontent in Bend Sinister 

2. Discourses of Gender and Sexuality: 

Galina Rylkova, Okrylyonnyy Soglyadatay - The Winged Eavesdropper: Nabokov and Kuzmin David H. J. Larmour, Getting One Past the Goalkeeper: Sports and Games in Glory

Paul Allen Miller, The Crewcut as Homoerotic Discourse in Nabokov's Pale Fire 

3. Lolita: 

Tony Moore, Seeing through Humbert: Focussing on the Feminist Sympathy in Lolita

Elizabeth Patnoe, Discourse, Ideology, and Hegemony: The Double Drama in and around Lolita 

4. Cultural Contacts: 

D. Barton Johnson, Nabokov and the Sixties; 

Suellen Stringer-Hye, Vladmir Nabokov and Popular Culture.

Russian Literature and the Classics

Edited by: Peter I. Barta, David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller

New York: Routledge, 1996

By focusing on the relationship between Russian literature and classical antiquity, this work admirably fulfills the stated purpose. Arranged chronologically, this volume examines significant junctures in Russian literary history.

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, such as 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 throughout the historical continuum of European culture that provides an insight into the contrasting ways in which that tradition manifested itself in the literature of Western and Central Europe as compared to the development of the Classical Tradition in Russia.

Contents:

Introduction, by the Editors

Thunder Imagery and the Turn Against Horace in Derzhavin's ''Evgeniyu, Zhizn' Zvanskaya'' (1807) by Charles Byrd

Mediating the Distance: Prophecy and Alterity in Greek Tragedy and Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' by Naomi Rood

The Source of Andrei Bely's Literary Mifotvorchestvo: 'The Case of the Ableukhovs' by Mary Jo White

Hellenism, Culture and Christianity: The Case of Vyacheslav Ivanov and his ''Palinode'' of 1927 by Pamela Davidson

Soviet Russia Through the Lens of Classical Antiquity: An Analysis of Greco-Roman Allusions and Thought in the Oeuvre of Vasilii Grossman by Frank Ellis

Classical Motifs in the Poetry of Alexksandr Kushner by David N. Wells