Roger Rees (ed.), Ted Hughes and the Classics. Classical Presences. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 348. ISBN 978-0-19-922971-0. $135.00. From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review: There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, [...]
My last post on the Biblical and philosophical concept of “kenosis” ended with a reference to Emmanuel Levinas, whose essay, “Judaism and Kenosis,” though unread at the time seemed to promise an altogether different approach that that found in contemporary and poststructuralist philosophies, which remain in large part derived from the Christian tradition. From Luther to Hegel [...]
Might the jingle be a very old thing, pre-dating radio and television? Here is Bakhtin trying to explain the type of orality featured in Rabelais through the medieval and early modern cris, or street cries: “The cris were loud advertisements called out by the Paris street vendors, and composed according to a certain versified form; [...]
If you know Lessing principally as the author of the Laocoon (as I did), then Hamburg Dramaturgy, a collection of his popular theater reviews, is sure to cast him in a stunning new light. Who knew Lessing was such a wit? (I, at least, did not.) Though he is still known for his ironic literary style, the academic [...]
Colin Burrow’s review of the most recent English version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (The London Review of Books: 12 March 2009) is less an evaluation of the merits of J.G. Nichols’s translation than an occasion to reopen some pertinent questions regarding the psychological dimension of literary narrative. Though the Decameron’s own generic heritage is mixed–its [...]
Prompted by a recent PC and Pixel cartoon, Mark Liberman over at Language Log gives a quick overview of the state of ‘linguistic profiling’ technology. (“As you can see, the best of the systems are doing pretty well at recognizing languages, but not so well at distinguishing one dialect from another.”) What’s especially interesting about [...]
Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827). And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines [...]
Peter Howarth’s November 6 LRB review of Robert Frost’s recently published Notebooks mentions the first draft of his unpublished play about the duel to which Ezra Pound challenged the poet Lascelles Abercrombie in 1913, “after Abercrombie had proposed that modern poetry could learn from Wordsworth’s interest in contemporary speech” — a suggestion that could have [...]
Paul De Man notes Harold Bloom’s insight that with respect to one poet’s influence on a later one, “the encounter must take place and that it takes precedence over any other events, biographical or historical, in the poet’s experience. This means that texts originate in contact with other texts rather than in contact with the [...]
Translation studies: a traditional theory stretching back to Schliermacher and still very much with us, frames the central question as: if all translation is “bringing over,” what is being translated and where is it going? Does the translator bring the “target” language to the “source” language, or vice versa? Whats at stake in any given [...]
Documents & Studies