Classics@, edited by a team working for the Center for Hellenic Studies and headed by Gregory Nagy and James O'Donnell, is designed to bring contemporary classical scholarship to a wide audience on the World Wide Web. Each issue will be dedicated to its own topic, often with guest editors, for an in-depth exploration of important current problems in the field of Classics. We hope that Classics@ will appeal not only to professional classicists, but also to the intellectually curious who are willing to enter the conversation in our discipline. We hope that they find that classical scholarship engages issues of great significance to a wide range of cultural and scholarly concerns and does so in a rigorous and challenging way.
Each issue of Classics@ is meant to be not static but dynamic, continuing to evolve with interaction from its readers as participants. New issues will appear when the editors think there is good material to offer. Often it will emphasize work done in and through the Center for Hellenic Studies, but it will also call attention to fresh and interesting work presented elsewhere on the web. It stresses the importance of research-in-progress, encouraging collegial debate (while discouraging polemics for the sake of polemics) as well as the timely sharing of important new information. Issue 14Issue 14: Singers and Tales in the 21st Century; The Legacies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord (ed. David F. Elmer and Peter McMurray). In December, 2010, a conference was convened at Harvard to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Albert Lord’s seminal book, The Singer of Tales, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of Lord’s mentor, Milman Parry. Twenty-nine speakers from around the world presented papers intended to illustrate the wide-ranging impact of the work of Parry and Lord. A collection of these papers will soon appear as a printed volume published by the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. To facilitate the dissemination of these studies, we present here preliminary versions of a number of the contributions.
Issue 13Issue 13: Greek Poetry and Sport. Many studies on Pindar, Homer, and other poets have discussed the specific uses of sport in each context, and studies on Greek sport have acknowledged the ways in which agonistic values and practices have been reflected in poetic literature, but there has been no single collection of studies devoted specifically to the intersection of Greek poetry and sport. This volume includes a range of contributions that represent a diversity of genres, periods, and approaches, which cut across strict poetic genres, occasionally even mixing poetry and prose in their approach. Poetry's interest in sport survived the rise and fall of genres like epinikia and satyr plays, and the rise and fall of myriad political and cultural changes in the Greek Mediterranean. We can only speculate on the many and complex reasons for the grip of poetry on sport and vice-versa, but they no doubt include Homeric intertextuality, the universal appeal of the topic to the elite and the dêmos, the universal presence of gymnasia and agonistic festivals (both blending poetry and sport), and the agonistic resonances between poetry and sport.
Issue 12Issue 12: Comparative Approaches to India and Greece. This issue contains papers by four scholars comparing specific literary and cultural traditions in India and Greece. The papers served as the basis of discussion at an event in February 2015 organized by the Center for Hellenic Studies in association with the Embassy of India. The discussion that took place among the scholars and guests on that occasion, which began with summaries of the four papers, is included as it was recorded. This is intended to be a starting point for further discussion of the topics presented and of other topics suggested by the nature and spirit of the event.
Issue 11Issue 11: The Rhetoric of Abuse in Greek Literature. This volume grew out of the need for a venue in which to engage collaboratively on the topic of abuse. Abuse has of course been widely studied, and in the last few years there has been a renewed interest in abuse as a broader cultural and literary phenomenon, but there are reasonable restrictions as to how it has been addressed. One goal of this volume is to initiate a scholarly discussion that will allow greater heterogeneity in the material covered and in the theoretical models brought to bear on that material. Another is to encourage experimentation and collaborative exchange among scholars working in seemingly unconnected fields. Most importantly, perhaps, we would like to foster a deeper understanding of the role of abuse in all of Greek literature, across genres and time periods, through the kind of cumulative knowledge that comes from collaborative work in different fields.
Issue 10 Issue 10: Historical Poetics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Greece: Essays in Honor of Lily Macrakis. History needs art to give it form; art needs history to give it resonance. This relationship of history and art is the theme of the essays by distinguished international scholars collected in this volume. Its publication celebrates the career and work of Professor Lily Macrakis. She is an eminent chronicler of modern Greek history whose seminal work, Venizelos: A Study in Cretan Leadership, remains essential to an understanding of the most influential Greek leader of the 20th century. Among her other accomplishments, Professor Macrakis was president of The Modern Greek Studies Association from 1977 to 1979 and has been an influential figure in the organization since its inception. Equally significant has been her role as a devoted teacher of Greek history and culture to multitudes of students. Professor Macrakis thus truly embodies the spirit and significance of the articles presented in this Festschrift so fittingly dedicated to her.
Issue 9Issue 9: Defense Mechanisms in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Classical Studies and Beyond. Nowadays people speak of “defense mechanisms” as both negative and positive forms of behavior: examples of negative forms are denial, repression, acting out, projection, rationalization, intellectualization, while one of the few positive forms is assertion, a way of responding that takes the middle ground between aggressive and passive. In the spirit of this positive form of assertion and in both technical and non-technical senses of the expression “defense mechanisms,” the present issue of Classics@ has been given its title. The aim is to publish online research papers and essays in Classics and in other disciplines, related or unrelated, that explore strategies where the primary purpose is to defend assertively rather than attack. The justification is straightforward: discoveries and discovery procedures in research require and deserve a reasoned defense.
Issue 8Issue 8: A Homer commentary in progress, eds. D. Frame, L. Muellner, and G. Nagy (coming soon)
Issue 7Issue 7: Les femmes, le féminin et le politique après Nicole Loraux, Colloque de Paris (INHA), novembre 2007 is the result of a conference held in Paris (INHA, 15–17 November 2007) which was co-organized by the Centre Louis Gernet (CNRS-EHESS), the Équipe Phéacie (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Université Denis-Diderot Paris VII) and the Réseau National Interuniversitaire sur le Genre (RING, Paris). The aim of the conference was to explore Nicole Loraux’s legacy concerning the feminine and the polis both in Hellenic Studies and in feminist scholarship.
Issue 6Issue 6: Reflecting on the Greek Epic Cycle is the result of a conference held in Ancient Olympia on 9–10 July 2010, which was co-organized by the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University) and the Centre for the Study of Myth and Religion in Greek and Roman Antiquity (University of Patras). The goal of the conference was to explore problems concerning the surviving fragments of the Greek Epic Cycle that have heretofore been neglected. Guest Editor: Efimia D. Karakantza.
Issue 5Issue 5: Proceedings of the Derveni Papyrus Conference reflects a three-day symposium on the Derveni Papyrus hosted by the Center for Hellenic Studies in July, 2008, on the occasion of the recent publication of the edition by Theokritos Kouremenos, George M. Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou (Florence, Olschki, 2006; the text of the papyrus from that edition is available on this website here). The symposium was an opportunity to gather scholars who in the course of the past decades have been working on this text to address a set of issues relating to the edition and integration of the papyrus, its translation, and its interpretation.
Issue 4
Issue 4: The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues is the online edition of a print volume published by the Center for Hellenic Studies in 2009 (available through Harvard University Press, here). This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of the newly-recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Containing eleven new essays by leading scholars, it addresses a wide range of textual and philological issues connected with the find. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the "New Sappho" can be appreciated as a gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging. Guest Editors: Ellen Greene and Marilyn B. Skinner.
Issue 3 Issue 3: The Homerizon: Conceptual Interrogations in Homeric Studies is the result of a colloquium held at the Center. The colloquium had as its goals the serious interrogation of cherished assumptions about Homeric “culture” and “texuality”; and the exploration of the wider cultural significance of the perennial Homeric Question(s).
Issue 2 Issue 2: Ancient Mediterranean Cultural Informatics. The second issue of Classics@ is the first edition of an ongoing project of publication aimed at documenting this emerging sub-discipline of our field, the scholarship of creating, analyzing, and disseminating humanist learning electronically. This issue features articles describing these projects and others like them — new work of high quality that is expanding the depth and breadth of our field. It also looks back at the history of this sub-discipline, and forward toward emerging standards, tools, and potentials.
Issue 1Issue 1: New Epigrams Attributed to Posidippus of Pella. Editors: Gregory Nagy and James O'Donnell. Guest Editors of Issue One: Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Elizabeth Kosmetatou, Martine Cuypers, and Francesca Angiò.
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