Article PDF
References
P.O. Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I),”Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951) 506.
See, e.g., D. Lodge,The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1977) 73–124, especially for the importance of context in attempts to apply Jakobson’s theory.
See J.L. Benson, “The Central Group of the Corfu Pediment,” inGestalt und Geschichte. Festschrift Karl Schefold (ed. M. Rohde-Liegle et al.),Antike Kunst Beiheft 4 (Bern, 1967) 48–60.
A.A. Donohue, “The Greek Images of the Gods,”Hephaistos 15 (1997) 31–45.
B.S. Ridgway, “An Issue of Methodology: Anakreon, Perikles, Xanthippos,”American Journal of Archaeology 102 (1998) 717–738.
In C.J. Eiseman and B.S. Ridgway,The Porticello Shipwreck: A Mediterranean Merchant Vessel of 415–385 B.C. (College Station, 1987) 100–106.
B.C. Madigan,The Temple of Apollo Bassitas (ed.F.A. Cooper) II.The Sculpture (Princeton, 1992), 80–81.
An exception is J.M. Hurwit, “The Words in the Image: Orality, Literacy, and Early Greek Art,”Word and Image 6.2 (1990) 180–197, in which sociable contexts are explored. See also T.J. Rusnak, “The Active Spectator: Art and the Viewer in Ancient Greece” (diss. Bryn Mawr College, 2001), emphasizing the social and collective contexts of the ancient interpretation of art.
E.R. Curtius,Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948) 23; tr. W.R. Trask,European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953) 15: “To understand Pindar’s poems requires severe mental effort—to understand the Parthenon Frieze does not.”
J. Derrida,La dissémination, Paris 1972, p. 230 (also quoted by Gumpert, p. xiv).
Cf. Robert E. Meagher’sHelen: Myth, Legend, and the Culture of Misogyny, New York 1995. See also N. Worman, “The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts,”Classical Antiquity 16 (1997), pp. 151–203.
InLa dissémination, Paris 1972.
“But any... subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present,” E. Auerbach,Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton, NJ 1953, p. 7.
“Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’Thesmophoriazousae,” in ead.,Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, Chicago 1996, pp. 375–416.
I should note that this well-produced book has a few minor misprints, mostly in ancient Greek texts.
Joseph Cropsey,Plato’s World: Man’s Place in the Cosmos (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 26.
Plato,The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968): 450b.
John R. Wallach,The Platonic Political Art: A Study of Critical Reason and Democrancy (University Park Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 10.
See my chapter “Plato’s Socrates” inThe Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 52–70.
[Cf. the review by Loren J. Samons III in this journal,IJCT 7 (2000/2001), pp. 265–266.—W.H.]
Hannes Heer, “The Difficulty of Ending a War: Reactions to the Exhibition ‘War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944,’” trans. Jane Caplan,History Workshop Journal 46 (1998) 187–203.
Among these one might mention David B. Morris,The Culture of Pain, Berkeley Los Angeles/London, 1991; Roselyne Rey,The History of Pain, trans. L. E. Wallace, J. A. Cadden, S. W. Cadden, Cambridge MA/London, 1993 (French orig.:Histoire de la douleur, Paris, 1993); Susan D. Moeller,Compassion Fatigue. How the media sell disease, famine, war and death, New York/London, 1999; Lawrence A. Tritle,From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival, (London & New York, 2000 (cf. the review by Simon Goldhill in this journal,IJCT 9 [2002/03] 132–135); William M. Reddy,The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge, 2001; Martha C. Nussbaum,Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge, 2001; Keith Tester,Compassion, Morality and the Media, Buckingham/Philadelphia, 2001; Terry Eagleton,Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford, 2003; Susan Sontag,Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, 2003; James Tatum,The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam, Chicago, 2003; Daniel Baraz,Medieval Cruelty. Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Ithaca, 2003; James A. Steintrager,Cruel Delight. Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman, Bloomington, 2003. (I am grateful to Wolfgang Haase for his advice in augmenting this list.)
Numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in this work, not to line numbers in the poem.
G.W. Most, ed.,Commentaries/Kommentare, Aporemata 4, Göttingen 1999; R.K. Gibson and C.S. Kraus, eds.,The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, Mnemosyne Supplementum 232, Leiden & Boston, 2002.
Neither claim is as off-the-wall as many conclusions in another recent examination ofUlysses as biblical allegory: e.g., Plumtree’s Potted Meat as a caricature of the Incarnation and Eucharist, “meat in a can for the Catholic community in an era of mass media” (Giuseppe Martella,Ulisse: Parallelo biblico e modernità [Bologna: CLUEB, 1997=Testi e Discorsi 16], 164–65.
In the most impressive examples of this multiple-level allegory, the second stage (incarnational/mystery) is linked to the first-levelhistorical event in the Old Testament by distinct similarities: as Joseph is sold by his brothers for twenty pieces of silver (Genesis 38:28), so too is Jesus betrayed by an apostle for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:16). This providential congruity of scriptural detail is “typology,” an inter-covenant figure of exegesis frequently used by the Church fathers even when no additional allegorical senses (moral, eschatological) were derived from a passage. (For the principles of typological exegesis see, e.g., G.W.H. Lampe and K.J. Woolcombe,Essays on Typology [London: Allenson, 1957=Studies in Biblical Theology 22].)
Sicari does not cite Hélène Cixous’ two applications of Dante’s prefatory epistle to Can Grande to Joycean criticism. In a rare instance of interpretive caution, Cixous hesitated to claim an analogy—much less a modernist allegory—between theCommedia andA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; her brief discussion of Psalm 113 inUlysses is contextually confused and inferentially vapid (The Exile of James Joyce, translated by Sally A. J. Purcell [New York: David Lewis, 1972], 638–40, 730–31; French orig.L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’Art du remplacement [Paris: B. Grasset, 1968=Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Paris-Sorbonne. Série “Recherches” t. 46], 724–26, 824–25).
Sicari states that “it is no coincidence that ‘Eccles’ is the root for the Greek word we translate as ‘church’,ecclesia” (183); from an analogous perspective, why not add apocalyptic numerology to fortuitous etymology by linking Bloom’s address to the “seven churches of Asia” (Revelation 1:4)?
In my judgment, it is far from self-evident that “[n]othing could be less poetic than ‘Ithaca’, written in plainest style imaginable” (xiv) or that its style “presumes a vantage point on the action of the world that is as close to the eternal as humanity can achieve” (173). In fact, at the opening of the episode, “Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature” (U.17.29–30).
Sicari does not mention two other recent works (both quite bizarre) that propose scriptural allegory as the overriding principle of design and detail in Joyce’s major works: forUlysses, Martella’s monograph (see note 1) Plumtree’s Potted Meat as a caricature of the Incarnation and Eucharist, “meat in a can for the Catholic community in an era of mass media” (Giuseppe Martella,Ulisse: Parallelo biblico e modernità [Bologna: CLUEB, 1997=Testi e Discorsi 16], 164–65); for theWake, Harry Burrell,Narrative Design in “Finnegans Wakes”: The “Wake” Lock Picked (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kahane, A., Donohue, A.A., Yatromanolakis, D. et al. Book reviews. Int class trad 10, 103–166 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02689175
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02689175