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What Is Said and What Is Not
The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface
Edited by Carlo Penco and Filippo Domaneschi
CSLI, 2014
This volume contains essays that explore explicit and implicit communication through linguistic research. Taking as a framework Paul Grice’s theories on “what is said,” the contributors explore a number of areas, including: the boundary between semantics and pragmatics; the concept of implicit communication; the idea of the logical form of our assertions; the notion of conventional meaning; the phenomenon of deixis, which refers to when an utterance require context in order to be understood fully; the treatment of definite descriptions; and the different kinds of pragmatic processes.   
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Semantic Properties of Diagrams and Their Cognitive Potentials
Atsushi Shimojima
CSLI, 2015
Why are diagrams sometimes so useful, facilitating our understanding and thinking, while at other times they can be unhelpful and even misleading? Drawing on a comprehensive survey of modern research in philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and graphic design, Semantic Properties of Diagrams and Their Cognitive Potentials reveals the systematic reasons for this dichotomy, showing that the cognitive functions of diagrams are rooted in the characteristic ways they carry information. In analyzing the logical mechanisms behind the relative efficacy of diagrammatic representation, Atsushi Shimojima provides deep insight into the crucial question: What makes a diagram a diagram?
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Information Sharing
Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation
Edited by Kees van Deemter and Rodger Kibble
CSLI, 2002
This book introduces the concept of information sharing as an area of cognitive science, defining it as the process by which speakers depend on "given" information to convey "new" information—an idea crucial to language engineering. Where previous work in information sharing was often fragmented between different disciplines, this volume brings together theoretical and applied work, and joins computational contributions with papers based on analyses of language corpora and on psycholinguistic experimentation.
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Lexical Relations
Jean-Pierre Koenig
CSLI, 1999
The thrust of this book is to provide a model of lexical relations which reconciles the lexicon's idiosyncratic and productive aspects. Building on work in Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar, an organization of lexical knowledge is proposed--- called the Type Underspecified Hierarchical Lexicon--- through which partial regularities, medium-size generalization, and truly productive processes receive a unified model. Its basic thesis is that all lexical relations reduce to categorization (the membership of the two related lexemes in a common category) and that category intersection is the only mechanism needed to model lexical processes provided lexical items can be stored partially underspecified as to their category membership. Aside from the conceptual simplification that results from this move, the book demonstrates that several empirical and theoretical benefits accrue to this architecture; in particular, many salient properties of morphological processes are shown to reduce to inherent, formal properties of the organization of the lexicon.
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Lexical Matters
Edited by Ivan A. Sag and Anna Szabolcsi
CSLI, 1992
This volume contains new research on the lexicon and its relation to other aspects of linguistics. These essays put forth empirical arguments to claim that specific theoretical assumptions concerning the lexicon play a crucial role in resolving problems pertaining to other componenets of grammer. Topics include: syntactic/semantic interface in the areas of aspect, argument structure, and thematic roles; lexicon-based accounts of quirky case, anaphora, and control; the boundary between the lexicon and the syntax in the domains of sentence comprehension and nominal compounding; and the possibility of extending nthe concpet of blocking beyond the traditional lexicon. Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Anna Szabolcsi is an associate professor of linguistics at UCLA. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 24
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Logodaedalus
Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe
Alex Marr, Raphaele Garrod, Jose Ramon Marcaida, Richard Oosterhoff
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Before Romantic genius, there was ingenuity. Early modern ingenuity defined every person—not just exceptional individuals—as having their own attributes and talents, stemming from an “inborn nature” that included many qualities, not just intelligence. Through ingenuity and its family of related terms, early moderns sought to understand and appreciate differences between peoples, places, and things in an attempt to classify their ingenuities and assign professions that were best suited to one’s abilities. Logodaedalus, a prehistory of genius, explores the various ways this language of ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750. By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a range of languages—Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German, and Dutch—the authors reveal the ways in which significant words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics, poetics, and artistic theory.
 
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Basic Color Terms
Their Universality and Evolution
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay
CSLI, 1999

The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions.

Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons.

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The World Color Survey
Paul Kay, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, and Richard Cook
CSLI, 2009

The 1969 publication of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's Basic Color Terms proved explosive and controversial. Contrary to the then-popular doctrine of random language variation, Berlin and Kay's multilingual study of color nomenclature indicated a cross-cultural and almost universal pattern in the selection of colors that received abstract names in each language. The ensuing debate helped reform the views of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists alike. After four decades in print, Basic Color Terms now has a sequel: in this book, the authors authoritatively extend the original survey, studying 110 additional unwritten languages in detail and in situ. The results are presented with charts showing the overall palette of color terms within each language as well as the levels of agreement among speakers.

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The Power of Babel
Language and Governance in the African Experience
Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Linguists estimate that there are currently nearly 2,000 languages in Africa, a staggering figure that is belied by the relatively few national languages. While African national politics, economics, and law are all conducted primarily in the colonial languages, the cultural life of the majority of citizens is conducted in a bewildering Babel of local and regional dialects, making language itself the center of debates over multiculturalism, gender studies, and social theory. In The Power of Babel, the noted Africanist scholar Ali Mazrui and linguist Alamin Mazrui explore this vast territory of African language.

The Power of Babel is one of the first comprehensive studies of the complex linguistic constellations of Africa. It draws on Ali Mazrui's earlier work in its examination of the "triple heritage" of African culture, in which indigenous, Islamic, and Western traditions compete for influence. In bringing the idea of the triple heritage to language, the Mazruis unravel issues of power, culture, and modernity as they are embedded in African linguistic life.

The first section of the book takes a global perspective, exploring such issues as the Eurocentrism of much linguistic scholarship on Africa; part two takes an African perspective on a variety of issues from the linguistically disadvantaged position of women in Africa to the relation of language policy and democratic development; the third section presents a set of regional studies, centering on the Swahili language's exemplification of the triple heritage.The Power of Babel unites empirical information with theories of nationalism and pluralism—among others—to offer the richest contextual account of African languages to date.
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Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the Major Iberian Languages
Fernando Martinez-Gil and Alfonso Morales-Front, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1997

This collection explores current issues in the phonology and morphology of the major Iberian languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish. Most of the essays are based on innovative theoretical frameworks and show how recent revolutions in theoretical ideas have affected the study of these languages.

Distinguished scholars address a diverse range of topics, including: stress assignment, phonological variability, distribution of rhotics, the imperative paradigm, focus, pluralization, spirantization, intonation, prosody, apocope, epenthesis, palatalization, and depalatalization.

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Toward a Rhetoric of Insult
Thomas Conley
University of Chicago Press, 2010

From high school cafeterias to the floor of Congress, insult is a truly universal and ubiquitous cultural practice with a long and earthy history. And yet, this most human of human behaviors has rarely been the subject of organized and comprehensive attention—until Toward a Rhetoric of Insult. Viewed through the lens of the study of rhetoric, insult, Thomas M. Conley argues, is revealed as at once antisocial and crucial for human relations, both divisive and unifying.

Explaining how this works and what exactly makes up a rhetoric of insult prompts Conley to range across the vast and splendidly colorful history of offense. Taking in Monty Python, Shakespeare, Eminem, Cicero, Henry Ford, and the Latin poet Martial, Conley breaks down various types of insults, examines the importance of audience, and explores the benign side of abuse. In doing so, Conley initiates readers into the world of insult appreciation, enabling us to regard insults not solely as means of expressing enmity or disdain, but as fascinating aspects of human interaction.

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An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages
Philip Baldi
Southern Illinois University Press, 1983

This comprehensive linguistic survey of the Indo-European groups synthesizes the vast amount of information contained in the spe­cialized handbooks of the individual stocks.

The text begins with an introduction to the concept of the Indo-European language family, the history of its discovery, and the techniques of analysis. The introduction also gives a structural sketch of Proto-Indo-European, the parent language from which the others are descended. Baldi then devotes a chapter to each of the 11 major branches of Indo-European (Italic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Tocharian, and Anatolian).

Each chapter provides an outline of the external history of the branch, its people, di­alects, and other relevant history. This out­line is followed by a structural sketch of the most important language or languages of the branch (e.g., Old Irish for Celtic, Sanskrit and Avestan for Indo-Iranian, Latin and Osco-Umbrian for Italic). The sketch also contains the phonology, morphology, and syntax of each language. There is lastly a sample text of each language containing both interlinear and free translation. In those branches where there are special issues (e.g., the relation of Italic to Celtic and Baltic to Slavic, or the problem of archaism in Hittite), additional discussions of these issues are pro­vided. Baldi’s final chapter gives a brief out­line of the “minor” Indo-European lan­guages such as Illyrian, Thracian, Raetic, and Phrygian. Adding further to the usefulness of the book are extensive bibliographies, an up-to-date map showing the geographical dis­tribution of the Indo-European languages throughout the world, and a detailed family tree diagram of the members of each sub­group within the Indo-European language family and their interrelationships.

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The Indo-European Dialects
Antoine Meillet
University of Alabama Press, 1967
This work translates Meillet’s classic philological study from the original 1908 French edition and the author’s 1922 introduction to a new printing.  Indexes, missing from the French editions, have been added by the translator for the convenience of the reader, as have bibliographical references to salient works from the half-century after original composition.
 

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Greek Dialects and the Transformation of an Indo-European Process
Gregory Nagy
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society
Émile Benveniste
HAU, 2016
Since its publication in 1969, Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire—here with a new introduction by Giorgio Agamben—has been the classic reference for tracing the institutional and conceptual genealogy of the sociocultural worlds of gifts, contracts, sacrifice, hospitality, authority, freedom, ancient economy, and kinship. A comprehensive and comparative history of words with analyses of their underlying neglected genealogies and structures of signification—and this via a masterful journey through Germanic, Romance, Indo-Iranian, Latin, and Greek languages—Benveniste’s dictionary is a must-read for anthropologists, linguists, literary theorists, classicists, and philosophers alike.

This book has famously inspired a wealth of thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben, François Jullien, and many others. In this new volume, Benveniste’s masterpiece on the study of language and society finds new life for a new generation of scholars. As political fictions continue to separate and reify differences between European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian societies, Benveniste reminds us just how historically deep their interconnections are and that understanding the way our institutions are evoked through the words that describe them is more necessary than ever.
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A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages
Carl Darling Buck
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Originally published in 1949 and appearing now for the first time in a paperbound edition, Buck's Dictionary remains an indispensable tool for diachronic analysis of the Indo-European languages. Arranged according to the meaning of words, the work contains more than 1,000 groupings of synonyms from the principal Indo-European languages. Buck first tabulates the words describing a particular concept and then discusses their etymological and semantic history, tracing changes in meaning of the root words as well as presenting cases indicating which of the older forms have been replaced by expressions of colloquial or foreign origin.
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Trespasses
Selected Writings
Masao Miyoshi
Duke University Press, 2010
Trespasses presents key writings of the Tokyo-born literary scholar Masao Miyoshi, one of the most important postwar intellectuals to link culture with politics and a remarkable critical voice within the academy. For more than four decades, Miyoshi worked outside the mainstream, trespassing into new fields, making previously unseen connections, and upending naive assumptions. With an impeccable sense of when a topic or discussion had lost its critical momentum, he moved on to the next question, and then the next after that, taking on matters of literary form, cross-cultural relations, globalization, art and architecture, the corporatization of the university, and the threat of ecological disaster. Trespasses reveals the tremendous range of Miyoshi’s thought and interests, shows how his thinking transformed over time, and highlights his recurring concerns.

This volume brings together eleven selections of Miyoshi’s previously published writing, a major new essay, a critical introduction to his life and work, and an interview in which Miyoshi reflects on the trajectory of his thought and the institutional history of modern Japan studies. In the new essay, “Literary Elaborations,” he provides a masterful overview of the nature of the contemporary university, closing with a call for a global environmental protection studies that would radically reconfigure academic disciplines and merge the hard sciences with the humanities and the social sciences. In the other, chronologically arranged selections, Miyoshi addresses cross-culture relations between Japan and the United States, English literary studies in Japan, and Japan studies in the U.S., as well as the organization of urban space and the integrity of art and architecture in aggressively marketed-oriented environments. Trespasses is an invaluable introduction to the work of a fearless cultural critic.

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Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967-1975
Peter Damerow and Robert K. EnglundIntroduction by C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky
Harvard University Press, 1989

This comprehensive study of the Proto-Elamite language (ca. 3000 BC) is based on a small archive recovered from the site of Tepe Yahya in southeastern Iran. The authors, two of the leading specialists on the most ancient written texts of the Near East, illuminate the structure of the texts, the numerical sign systems used, and the relation of Proto-Elamite to other protocuneiform writing systems. A computer-generated sign list compares the written archive from Tepe Yahya with those of other archaeological sites from which Proto-Elamite texts have been recovered.

The volume offers a new understanding of the language and culture of the Proto-Elamites as well as important insights into the economic structure of the earliest literate civilizations. With a new preface by the authors.

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Iron Age Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions
Annick Payne
SBL Press, 2012
Hieroglyphic Luwian belongs to the Anatolian group of ancient languages and was inscribed primarily on stone, using an indigenous Anatolian pictorial writing system. These Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions were written over a period of centuries in the region of Anatolia and northern Syria. Their authors were primarily the rulers of the so-called Neo-Hittite states, contemporaries and neighbors of early Israel. This volume collects some of the most important and representative of the inscriptions in transliteration and translation, organized by genre. Each text is accompanied by relevant information on provenance, dating, and other points of interest that will engage specialist and nonspecialist alike.
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The Dialects of Ancient Gaul
Prolegomena and Records of the Dialects
Joshua Whatmough
Harvard University Press, 1970
Joshua Whatmough's monumental study of the dialects of Ancient Gaul heretofore has been available only in copies made from microfilm at considerable cost. This new edition makes readily accessible a book of first importance to Keltic scholarship. The work is organized by geographic areas and covers the Alpine Regions, Gallia Narbonensis, Aquitania, Lugdunensis, Belgica, Germania Inferior, Germania Superior, and the Agri Decumates with the Upper Rhine and Danube. There are several appendices, and Whatmough's “Keltika,” originally published in 1944, is included as an introduction.
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Homer and the Nibelungenlied
Comparative Studies in Epic Style
Bernard Fenik
Harvard University Press, 1986

Bernard Fenik analyzes the style of the Iliad and the Nibelungenlied, showing how the narratives work. In the process he sheds new light on the artistry of ancient and medieval epics. This in turn touches on the long-debated question of whether and to what extent they were orally composed.

In the Homeric poems, medieval German epics, and the Chanson de Roland, Fenik finds similarities in the shaping of episodes and scenes. His analysis of narrative structures reveals controlled composition even where the language is heavily formulaic and the action highly stylized. This level of artistic control does not in itself rule out oral composition but does force a redefinition of the terms in which that theory is applied.

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Thucydides on the Nature of Power
A. Geoffrey Woodhead
Harvard University Press, 1970
The implications of Thucydides' hostility to full democracy have long been avoided by scholars. In this provocative study the author confronts and examines this aspect of Thucydides' thought in detail. A. Geoffrey Woodhead also discusses his controversial interpretation of Thucydides' view of the nature of power: that equally among states and individuals, the impulse toward power follows its own laws, which are not immoral but amoral, and which should be viewed for themselves without ethical or emotional confusion.
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Isis Among the Greeks and Romans
Friedrich Solmsen
Harvard University Press, 1979

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Tragedy and Civilization
An Interpretation of Sophocles
Charles Segal
Harvard University Press, 1981

This major new interpretation makes use of a structuralist analysis of Greek culture to probe the meaning of Sophoclean tragedy. After developing a theoretical framework which encompasses much of early Greek literature and tragedy, Mr. Segal provides a close reading of the seven extant plays, with special attention to style, form, and character. The book yields new understanding of Sophocles' poetic and dramatic art and also achieves a coherent statement of Sophocles' view of the human condition and implicit definition of civilization. Mr. Segal shows in the plays the relation of man to his potential savagery, the suspension of the hero between the extremes of animal violence and quasi-divine greatness, the relation of tragic heroism to social norms, ritual, and communication.

This thorough rereading of Sophocles will well serve students of Greek thought and poetry as well as those interested in seeing literature against a background of myth and ritual.

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Aristotle and the Renaissance
Charles B. Schmitt
Harvard University Press, 1983
This cogent essay explores a hitherto unstudied aspect of Renaissance intellectual history and refines our understanding of the impact of Greek philosophy on Western thought. It is generally recognized that Aristotle was a touchstone for the learned world in the Middle Ages. Charles Schmitt shows here that what happened in the following centuries was not a mere continuation of the medieval tradition but a vital new development, influenced by the ideas of this era of ferment. He samples the response to Aristotle during the Renaissance, viewing the writings of Catholics and Protestants, humanists, scholastics, and scientists; he surveys the different kinds of works from which Renaissance readers learned their Aristotle; and he looks at the extent to which Aristotelians assimilated other modes of thought in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Schmitt's analysis offers intellectual historians a corrected picture of this important period.
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Herodotean Narrative and Discourse
Mabel Lang
Harvard University Press, 1984
Mabel Lang offers a new interpretation of Herodotus. Her reading of the “Father of History” pinpoints the aspects of his style that clearly derive from oral composition. Lang examines oral techniques in storytelling, known from folktales and other oral literature as well as from Homer. She shows how the dramatic use of speeches—so characteristic of folk literature—played an important part in Herodotus' development of history out of the chronologies and geographies that he knew. Story form and speeches attributed to historical persons, she demonstrates, follow traditional formulas. She also studies in detail Herodotus' distinctive use of proverbs and rhetorical questions. Throughout, Lang draws on a variety of materials and offers particularly revealing comparisons of Homeric and Herodotean styles. This analysis of the evidence for oral composition in Herodotus' Histories opens a new perspective for students and scholars of Greek history.
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The Art of Bacchylides
Anne Pippin Burnett
Harvard University Press, 1985
Anne Burnett shows us the art of Bacchylides in the context of Greek lyric traditions. She discusses the beginnings of choral poetry and the functions of the choral myth; she describes the purposes of the victory song in particular and the practices of Bacchylides and Pindar as they fulfilled their victory commissions. In analyzing individual poems Burnett's approach is two-fold, for each ode is seen as a choral performance reflecting archaic cult practice, while it is also studied as the expression of a particular poetic vision and sensibility. Thus the formal elements of the Bacchylidean victory songs are recognized as the response of a chorus which must give semi-religious praise to a noble athlete or prize-winning prince in times of increasing democracy. At the same time an artistry and an ethic peculiar to Bacchylides are discovered in the manipulation of fictions and mythic materials.
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Bakhtin and the Classics
R. Bracht Branham
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Mikhail Bakhtin's critical and theoretical experiments have inspired original work in the humanities and social sciences, but Bakhtin and the Classics is the first book to focus on the relationship between Bakhtin and classical studies, the discipline in which Bakhtin himself was trained. Clearly demonstrating the fundamental importance of classical literature in his work, Bakhtin and the Classics expands our understanding of both Bakhtin's thought and the literary and cultural history of antiquity. 

The authors, eminent classicists and distinguished critics of Bakhtin, put Bakhtin into dialogue with the classics--and classicists into dialogue with Bakhtin. Each essay offers a critical account of an important aspect of Bakhtin's thought and examines the value of his approach in the context of literary or cultural history. Beginning with an overview of Bakhtin's notion of carnival laughter, perhaps his central critical concept, the volume explores Bakhtin's thought and writing in relation to Homer's epic verse. Catullus's lyric poetry, ancient Roman novels, and Greek philosophy from Aristotle's theory of narrative to the work of Antiphon the Sophist. The results are of interest and importance to Bakhtinians, theorists, and classicists. 
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Complacency
Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education
John T. Hamilton
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.
 
In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.
 
The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.
 
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Postclassicisms
The Postclassicisms Collective
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Made up of nine prominent scholars, The Postclassicisms Collective aims to map a space for theorizing and reflecting on the values attributed to antiquity. The product of these reflections, Postclassicisms takes up a set of questions about what it means to know and care about Greco-Roman antiquity in our turbulent world and offers suggestions for a discipline in transformation, as new communities are being built around the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Structured around three primary concepts—value, time, and responsibility—and nine additional concepts, Postclassicisms asks scholars to reflect upon why they choose to work in classics, to examine how proximity to and distance from antiquity has been—and continues to be—figured, and to consider what they seek to accomplish within their own scholarly practices. Together, the authors argue that a stronger critical self-awareness, an enhanced sense of the intellectual history of the methods of classics, and a greater understanding of the ethical and political implications of the decisions that the discipline makes will lead to a more engaged intellectual life, both for classicists and, ultimately, for society. A timely intervention into the present and future of the discipline, Postclassicisms will be required reading for professional classicists and students alike and a model for collaborative disciplinary intervention by scholars in other fields.
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Matrices of Genre
Authors, Canons, and Society
Mary Depew
Harvard University Press, 2000

The literary genres given shape by the writers of classical antiquity are central to our own thinking about the various forms literature takes. Examining those genres, the essays collected here focus on the concept and role of the author and the emergence of authorship out of performance in Greece and Rome.

In a fruitful variety of ways the contributors to this volume address the questions: what generic rules were recognized and observed by the Greeks and Romans over the centuries; what competing schemes were there for classifying genres and accounting for literary change; and what role did authors play in maintaining and developing generic contexts? Their essays look at tragedy, epigram, hymns, rhapsodic poetry, history, comedy, bucolic poetry, prophecy, Augustan poetry, commentaries, didactic poetry, and works that "mix genres."

The contributors bring to this analysis a wide range of expertise; they are, in addition to the editors, Glenn W. Most, Joseph Day, Ian Rutherford, Deborah Boedeker, Eric Csapo, Marco Fantuzzi, Stephanie West, Alessandro Barchiesi, Ineke Sluiter, Don Fowler, and Stephen Hinds. The essays are drawn from a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies.

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Ancient Literacy
William V. Harris
Harvard University Press, 1989

How many people could read and write in the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans?

No one has previously tried to give a systematic answer to this question. Most historians who have considered the problem at all have given optimistic assessments, since they have been impressed by large bodies of ancient written material such as the graffiti at Pompeii. They have also been influenced by a tendency to idealize the Greek and Roman world and its educational system.

In Ancient Literacy W. V. Harris provides the first thorough exploration of the levels, types, and functions of literacy in the classical world, from the invention of the Greek alphabet about 800 B.C. down to the fifth century A.D. Investigations of other societies show that literacy ceases to be the accomplishment of a small elite only in specific circumstances. Harris argues that the social and technological conditions of the ancient world were such as to make mass literacy unthinkable. Noting that a society on the verge of mass literacy always possesses an elaborate school system, Harris stresses the limitations of Greek and Roman schooling, pointing out the meagerness of funding for elementary education.

Neither the Greeks nor the Romans came anywhere near to completing the transition to a modern kind of written culture. They relied more heavily on oral communication than has generally been imagined. Harris examines the partial transition to written culture, taking into consideration the economic sphere and everyday life, as well as law, politics, administration, and religion. He has much to say also about the circulation of literary texts throughout classical antiquity.

The limited spread of literacy in the classical world had diverse effects. It gave some stimulus to critical thought and assisted the accumulation of knowledge, and the minority that did learn to read and write was to some extent able to assert itself politically. The written word was also an instrument of power, and its use was indispensable for the construction and maintenance of empires. Most intriguing is the role of writing in the new religious culture of the late Roman Empire, in which it was more and more revered but less and less practiced.

Harris explores these and related themes in this highly original work of social and cultural history. Ancient Literacy is important reading for anyone interested in the classical world, the problem of literacy, or the history of the written word.

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Richard Bentley
Poetry and Enlightenment
Kristine Louise Haugen
Harvard University Press, 2011

What made the classical scholar Richard Bentley deserve to be so viciously skewered by two of the literary giants of his day—Jonathan Swift in the Battle of the Books and Alexander Pope in the Dunciad? The answer: he had the temerity to bring classical study out of the scholar's closet and into the drawing rooms of polite society. Kristine Haugen’s highly engaging biography of a man whom Rhodri Lewis characterized as “perhaps the most notable—and notorious—scholar ever to have English as a mother tongue” affords a fascinating portrait of Bentley and the intellectual turmoil he set in motion.

Aiming at a convergence between scholarship and literary culture, the brilliant, caustic, and imperious Bentley revealed to polite readers the doings of professional scholars and induced them to pay attention to classical study. At the same time, Europe's most famous classical scholar adapted his own publications to the deficiencies of non-expert readers. Abandoning the church-oriented historical study of his peers, he worked on texts that interested a wider public, with spectacular and—in the case of his interventionist edition of Paradise Lost—sometimes lamentable results.

If the union of worlds Bentley craved was not to be achieved in his lifetime, his provocations show that professional humanism left a deep imprint on the literary world of England's Enlightenment.

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Encounters and Reflections
Conversations with Seth Benardete
Seth Benardete
University of Chicago Press, 2002
By turns wickedly funny and profoundly illuminating, Encounters and Reflections presents a captivating and unconventional portrait of the life and works of Seth Benardete. One of the leading scholars of ancient thought, Benardete here reflects on both the people he knew and the topics that fascinated him throughout his career in a series of candid, freewheeling conversations with Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis.
The first part of the book discloses vignettes about fellow students, colleagues, and acquaintances of Benardete's who later became major figures in the academic and intellectual life of twentieth-century America. We glimpse the student days of Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and we discover the life of the mind as lived by well-known scholars such as David Grene, Jacob Klein, and Benardete's mentor Leo Strauss. We also encounter a number of other learned, devoted, and sometimes eccentric luminaries, including T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Werner Jaeger, John Davidson Beazley, and Willard Quine. In the book's second part, Benardete reflects on his own intellectual growth and on his ever-evolving understanding of the texts and ideas he spent a lifetime studying. Revisiting some of his recurrent themes—among them eros and the beautiful, the city and the law, and the gods and the human soul—Benardete shares his views on thinkers such as Plato, Homer, and Heidegger, as well as the relations between philosophy and science and between Christianity and ancient Roman thought.

Engaging and informative, Encounters and Reflections brings Benardete's thought to life to enlighten and inspire a new generation of thinkers.
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“I have always loved the Holy Tongue”
Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship
Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg
Harvard University Press, 2011

“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek.

The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.

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Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist
Laura Cereta
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Renaissance writer Laura Cereta (1469–1499) presents feminist issues in a predominantly male venue—the humanist autobiography in the form of personal letters. Cereta's works circulated widely in Italy during the early modern era, but her complete letters have never before been published in English. In her public lectures and essays, Cereta explores the history of women's contributions to the intellectual and political life of Europe. She argues against the slavery of women in marriage and for the rights of women to higher education, the same issues that have occupied feminist thinkers of later centuries.

Yet these letters also furnish a detailed portrait of an early modern woman’s private experience, for Cereta addressed many letters to a close circle of family and friends, discussing highly personal concerns such as her difficult relationships with her mother and her husband. Taken together, these letters are a testament both to an individual woman and to enduring feminist concerns.
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Of Farming and Classics
A Memoir
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 2006

A fiercely independent thinker, colorful storyteller, and spirited teacher, David Grene devoted his life to two things: farming, which he began as a boy in Ireland and continued into old age; and classics, which he taught for several decades that culminated in his translating and editing, with Richmond Lattimore, of The Complete Greek Tragedies.

In this charming memoir, which he wrote during the years leading up to his death in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine, Grene weaves together these interests to tell a quirky and absorbing story of the sometimes turbulent and always interesting life he split between the University of Chicago—where he helped found the Committee on Social Thought—and the farm he kept back in Ireland.

Charting the path that took him from Europe to Chicago in 1937, and encompassing his sixty-five-year career at the university, Grene’s book draws readers into the heady and invigorating climate of his time there. And it is elegantly balanced with reflections stemming from his work on the farm where he hunted, plowed and regularly traveled on horseback to bring his cows home for milking. Grene’s form and humor are quite his own, and his brilliant storytelling will enthrall anyone interested in the classics, rural Ireland, or twentieth-century intellectual history, especially as it pertains to the University of Chicago.

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The Invention of Jane Harrison
Mary Beard
Harvard University Press, 2000

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman--as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own, she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens.

This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image. And she contrasts her story with that of Eugénie Sellers Strong, a younger contemporary and onetime intimate, the author of major work on Roman art and once a glittering figure at the British School in Rome--but who lost the race for renown. The setting for the story of Harrison's career is Classical scholarship in this period--its internal arguments and allegiances and especially the influence of the anthropological strain most strikingly exemplified by Sir James Frazer. Questioning the common criteria for identifying intellectual "influence" and "movements," Beard exposes the mythology that is embedded in the history of Classics. At the same time she provides a vivid picture of a sparkling intellectual scene. The Invention of Jane Harrison offers shrewd history and undiluted fun.

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front cover of The Life and Work of Francis Willey Kelsey
The Life and Work of Francis Willey Kelsey
Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Arts
John Griffiths Pedley
University of Michigan Press, 2011

President of the Archaeological Institute of America, professor at the University of Michigan from 1889 to 1927, and president of the American Philological Association, Francis Kelsey was crucially involved in the founding or growth of major educational institutions. He came to maturity in a period of great technological change in communications, transportation, and manufacturing. Kelsey took full advantage of such innovations in his ceaseless drive to promote education for all, to further the expansion of knowledge, and to champion the benefits of the study of antiquity.

A vigorous traveler around the United States, Europe, and the Mediterranean, Kelsey strongly believed in the value of personally viewing sites ancient and modern and collecting artifacts that could be used by the new museums and universities that were springing up in the United States. This collecting habit put him in touch with major financiers of the day, including Charles Freer, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, as he sought their help for important projects.

Drawing heavily on Kelsey's daily diaries now held at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, John Griffiths Pedley gives us a biography that records the wide-ranging activities of a gifted and energetic scholar whose achievements mirrored the creative and contributive innovations of his contemporary Americans.

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front cover of The Drunken Duchess of Vassar
The Drunken Duchess of Vassar
Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar
Barbara McManus Judith P. Hallett Christopher Stray
The Ohio State University Press, 2017

In this biography, Barbara McManus recovers the intriguing life story of Grace Harriet Macurdy (1866–1946), Professor of Greek at Vassar College and the first woman classicist to focus her scholarship on the lives of ancient Greco-Roman women. Fondly known as “the Drunken Duchess,” although she never drank alcohol, Macurdy came from a poor family with no social, economic, or educational advantages. Moreover, she struggled with disability for decades after becoming almost totally deaf in her early fifties. Yet she became an internationally known Greek scholar with a long list of publications and close friends as renowned as Gilbert Murray and John Masefield.

Through Macurdy’s eyes and experiences, McManus examines significant issues and developments from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, such as the opening of higher education to women, the erosion of gender and class barriers in the professions, the delicate balancing act between personal and professional life required of women, the marginalized role of women’s colleges in academic politics, and changes in the discipline and profession of Classics in response to the emerging role of women and new social conditions.

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