Search Results

Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon

Mario Telò

in Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: "Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon"

Starting with a literary anecdote from Aelian that tellingly rewrites the audience response to Aristophanes’ defeated Clouds in 423 BCE, the chapter introduces the book’s overarching concerns: ... More

Starting with a literary anecdote from Aelian that tellingly rewrites the audience response to Aristophanes’ defeated Clouds in 423 BCE, the chapter introduces the book’s overarching concerns: dramatic reception, the canon, and aesthetics—the character (including psychological and even physical effects) of the connection between play and audience, or more precisely how it is constructed. The discussion begins with the payoff of this construction, namely critical elevation culminating in canonical hegemony, before laying out the methodology, grounded in intratextual and intertextual readings, by which Aristophanes’ aesthetic discourse may be discerned. The chapter concludes with a preliminary examination of this aesthetic discourse, showing how Knights previews themes of the narrative mapped out in Wasps and the second Clouds.Less

Crashing the Text

Emily Selove

in Hikayat Abi al-Qasim: A Literary Banquet

This Chapter shows that Abūl-Qāsim is part of a literary tradition of party-crashing characters, and that in this tradition, the tension between food and language serves to problematise the ... More

This Chapter shows that Abūl-Qāsim is part of a literary tradition of party-crashing characters, and that in this tradition, the tension between food and language serves to problematise the representational potentials of language. It discusses other famous works of banquet or sympotic literature, like IbnBuṭlān’s Da‘wat al-aṭibbā’, Plato's Symposium, Xenophon's Symposium, Athenaeus's Deipnosophistae, and Petronius's Cena. Some of these texts use a party-crashing character as a kind of intratextual narrator, and all of them play food and words off of one another, raising questions about language that claims to be didactic or to represent reality, but which sometimes, by contrast, seems to be nonsensical, or to deliberately mislead or confuse the reader.Less

‘Daughters Sacrificed to Strangers’: Interracial Desires and Intertextual Memories in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge

in Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar

This chapter examines Caryl Phillips' Cambridge (1991). In this novel, the events on an early nineteenth-century West Indian estate are told and retold from a variety of competing perspectives, with ... More

This chapter examines Caryl Phillips' Cambridge (1991). In this novel, the events on an early nineteenth-century West Indian estate are told and retold from a variety of competing perspectives, with the central narrative conflict unfolding between the accounts given by the middle-class Englishwoman, Emily Cartwright, and the eponymous slave, Cambridge. What is notable about this intratextual exchange is the way in which it functions as a mirror for the novel's intertextual practices, particularly as they relate to Matthew Lewis's Journal – the primary historical source on which Phillips bases Emily's own plantation memoir. Despite his Christian stoicism, Cambridge is, with respect to this memoir, a figure of rebellion: he tells a tale in which the white male sexual violence unspoken by Emily is dramatically articulated in the rape of his own slave-wife by the plantation manager. His subversive counter-statement is simultaneously the vehicle through which Phillips's novel itself rebels against Lewis's text, breaching its silences and polluting its discursive purity.Less

Intratextual Method

Aysha A. Hidayatullah

in Feminist Edges of the Qur’an

This chapter discusses the feminist interpretive method of reading the Qur’an intratextually (i.e., in view of its textual holism) by comparing verses and terms of the Qur’an to one another instead ... More

This chapter discusses the feminist interpretive method of reading the Qur’an intratextually (i.e., in view of its textual holism) by comparing verses and terms of the Qur’an to one another instead of reading them in isolation, as well as by reading verses in light of what the exegetes have identified as the Qur’an’s overall aim of advocating justice and equality for all human beings. The chapter notes the premodern and modern precedents of this strategy in the concepts of the Qur’an’s nazm (internal coherence) and tafsir al-Qur’an bi-l-Qur’an (interpreting the Qur’an by means of the Qur’an itself). The chapter traces the use of the feminist exegetical arguments that no sound interpretation of the Qur’an may contradict the Qur’an’s overarching principles of male-female equality and marital harmony, and that all verses should be read in light of the Qur’an overall trajectory toward justice and social transformation.Less

Introduction: Kallimachos and the Politics of Praise

Michael Brumbaugh

in The New Politics of Olympos: Kingship in Kallimachos' Hymns

The introduction provides an overview of the scope and shape of the inquiry undertaken in The New Politics of Olympos. Additionally, it attempts to establish a new frame of reference for thinking ... More

The introduction provides an overview of the scope and shape of the inquiry undertaken in The New Politics of Olympos. Additionally, it attempts to establish a new frame of reference for thinking about interactions between Kallimachos’ Hymns and the burgeoning Ptolemaic regime. The approach outlined here and throughout the book is meant to move outside the confines of formalist notions of genre and stereotypes of the scholar poet by reframing the analysis around the broader interplay between literature and political power in the Hellenistic world. Furthermore, the introduction orients readers toward a new approach to reading the six poems that make up Kallimachos’ Hymns intratextually—as a carefully arranged poetry book.Less