Genre, Gender, and Performance in Plato's Laws

Genre, Gender, and Performance in Plato's Laws PDF Author: Marcus Folch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Genre, Gender, and Performance in Plato's Laws

Genre, Gender, and Performance in Plato's Laws PDF Author: Marcus Folch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description


The City and the Stage

The City and the Stage PDF Author: Marcus Folch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190606487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
What role did poetry, music, song, and dance play in the social and political life of the ancient Greek city? How did philosophy respond to, position itself against, and articulate its own ambitions in relation to the poetic tradition? How did ancient philosophers theorize and envision alternatives to fourth-century Athenian democracy? The City and the Stage poses such questions in a study of the Laws, Plato's last, longest, and unfinished philosophical dialogue. Reading the Laws in its literary, historical, and philosophical contexts, this book offers a new interpretation of Plato's final dialogue with the Greek poetic tradition and an exploration of the dialectic between philosophy and mimetic art. Although Plato is often thought hostile to poetry and famously banishes mimetic art from the ideal city of the Republic, The City and the Stage shows that in his final work Plato made a striking about-face, proposing to rehabilitate Athenian performance culture and envisaging a city, Magnesia, in which poetry, music, song, and dance are instrumental in the cultivation of philosophical virtues. Plato's views of the performative properties of music, dance, and poetic language, and the psychological underpinnings of aesthetic experience receive systematic treatment in this book for the first time. The social role of literary criticism, the power of genres to influence a society and lead to specific kinds of constitutions, performance as a mechanism of gender construction, and the position of women in ancient Greek performance culture are central themes throughout this study. A wide-ranging examination of ancient Greek philosophy and fourth-century intellectual culture, The City and the Stage will be of significance to anyone interested in ancient Greek literature, performance, and Platonic philosophy in its historical contexts.

The City and the Stage

The City and the Stage PDF Author: Marcus Folch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266171
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
What role did the performance of poetry, music, song, and dance play in the political life of the ancient city? How has philosophy positioned itself and articulated its own ambitions in relation to the poet tradition? This book poses such questions through a reading of Plato's last, longest, and unfinished work, the Laws.

Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Political Thought

Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Political Thought PDF Author: Michael Shalom Kochin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521808521
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece

Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece PDF Author: Yiqun Zhou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139490400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Ancient China and Greece are two classical civilisations that have exerted far-reaching influence in numerous areas of human experience and are often invoked as the paradigms in East-West comparison. This book examines gender relations in the two ancient societies as reflected in convivial contexts such as family banquets, public festivals, and religious feasts. Two distinct patterns of interpersonal affinity and conflict emerge from the Chinese and Greek sources that show men and women organising themselves and interacting with each other in social occasions intended for collective pursuit of pleasure. Through an analysis of the two different patterns, Yiqun Zhou illuminates the different socio-political mechanisms, value systems, and fabrics of human bonds in the two classical traditions. Her book will be important for readers who are interested in the comparative study of societies, gender studies, women's history, and the legacy of civilisations.

Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws

Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws PDF Author: Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016878
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
This volume illuminates one underexplored aspect of Plato's Laws: its uniquely rich discussion of cultural matters. This requires the contributions of scholars whose expertise resides beyond the boundaries of pure philosophical inquiry, spanning art theory and criticism, social anthropology, and comparative literature.

Law as Performance

Law as Performance PDF Author: Julie Stone Peters
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192898493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, --as it still does today.

A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity

A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity PDF Author: Emily Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350154881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900441259X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models. Eleven papers by leading scholars of ancient Greek culture cover a wide range of media, from Sappho’s songs to elegiac inscriptions to classical tragedy. Collectively, they develop a more holistic understanding of the concept of lyric genre, its relevance to the study of ancient texts, and its relation to subsequent ideas about lyric.

Platonic Legislations

Platonic Legislations PDF Author: David Lloyd Dusenbury
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319598430
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
This book discusses how Plato, one the fiercest legal critics in ancient Greece, became – in the longue durée – its most influential legislator. Making use of a vast scholarly literature, and offering original readings of a number of dialogues, it argues that the need for legal critique and the desire for legal permanence set the long arc of Plato’s corpus—from the Apology to the Laws. Modern philosophers and legal historians have tended to overlook the fact that Plato was the most prolific legislator in ancient Greece. In the pages of his Republic and Laws, he drafted more than 700 statutes. This is more legal material than can be credited to the archetypal Greek legislators—Lycurgus, Draco, and Solon. The status of Plato’s laws is unique, since he composed them for purely hypothetical cities. And remarkably, he introduced this new genre by writing hard-hitting critiques of the Greek ideal of the sovereignty of law. Writing in the milieu in which immutable divine law vied for the first time with volatile democratic law, Plato rejected both sources of law, and sought to derive his laws from what he called ‘political technique’ (politikê technê). At the core of this technique is the question of how the idea of justice relates to legal and institutional change. Filled with sharp observations and bold claims, Platonic Legislations shows that it is possible to see Plato—and our own legal culture—in a new light “In this provocative, intelligent, and elegant work D. L. Dusenbury has posed crucial questions not only as regards Plato’s thought in the making, but also as regards our contemporaneity.”—Giorgio Camassa, University of Udine “There is a tension in Greek law, and in Greek legal thinking, between an understanding of law as unchangeable and authoritative, and a recognition that formal rules are often insufficient for the interpretation of reality, and need to be constantly revised to match it. Dusenbury’s book illuminates the sophistication of Plato’s legal thought in its engagement with this tension, and explores the potential of Plato’s reflection for modern legal theory.”—Mirko Canevaro, The University of Edinburgh