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A suggestive study of an elemental aspect of fiction
Designed for intermediate-level students and based on the author's many years of classroom experience, this textbook presents an outline of the essential forms and syntax of ancient Attic Greek. Louise Pratt also includes a handy appendix listing two hundred common Attic verbs and their principal parts
After studying ancient Greek for a year, students often become discouraged when presented with unabridged classical texts that offer only minimal supportive apparatus. In welcome contrast, this intermediate-level textbook reinforces the first-year lessons and enables students to read Plato's Symposium, one of the most engaging works in Attic Greek, the dialect taught in most first-year courses. To meet the needs of students who are reading extended passages of challenging Greek for the first time, Louise Pratt, a classical scholar with more than twenty years' teaching experience, has lightly condensed the early readings, supplementing them with review exercises and new vocabulary. She includ...
In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of ...
This book argues that poetry is compatible with systematic knowledge including science, and indeed inherent in it; it also discusses particular poems that engage with such knowledge, including those of Lucretius, Vergil, and Vita Sackville-West. The book argues that there are substantial similarities between knowledge-making and poetry-making, for example in their being shaped by language, including metaphor, and in their seeking unity in the world, under the impulse of eros and pleasure. The book also discusses some of the obstacles to a ‘poetry of knowledge’, including scientific objectivism, the Kantian tradition in philosophy, and the separation of the ‘two cultures’ in our academic and intellectual institutions. The book is designed to be accessible to all those interested in the issue of the ‘two cultures’, or in the role of poetry and of science in contemporary culture.
Discourses of Difference unravels the complexities of writings by British women travellers of the `high colonial' period. Sara Mills examines the relation of women travellers to colonialism, positioned as they were at the site of conflicting discourses: femininity, feminism, and patriarchal imperialism. Using feminist discourse theory, Sara Mills analyses the writings of three women travellers - Alexandra David-Neel, Mary Kingsley and Nina Mazuchelli. Her examination of agency, identity, and the contemporary social environment, is an important and inspiring step forward in post-colonial cultural and literary theory.
A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence from tragedy and comedy, Joshua Billings shines new light on the development of early Greek philosophy, arguing that drama is our best source for understanding the intellectual culture of classical Athens. In this incisive book, Billings recasts classical Greek intellectual history as a conversation across discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely shared theoretical questions. He argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" was a defined category in the fifth century BCE, and develops a method of reading dramatic form as a structured investigation of issues at the heart of the emerging discipline of philosophy. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's most original classical scholars, The Philosophical Stage presents a novel approach to ancient drama and sets a path for a renewed understanding of early Greek thought.
In Strategies of Persuasion in Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis–Kings, Eva Tyrell comparatively analyzes narrative means in two monumental ancient texts about the past. Combining a narratological approach with insights of modern historical theory and biblical scholarship, she investigates patterns of narrative persuasion as a trans-cultural phenomenon and their connection with ancient concepts of reality and truth. The study contrasts differences in fundamental narrative structures of both narratives, such as mediacy and discursive versus diegetic text portions. It explores the role of material remains mentioned in the accounts to evoke or even create the reality of a past.
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is a forceful, perplexing, important book, radical in its own time and profoundly influential ever since. This introductory textbook offers a comprehensive, close reading of the entire work, with a section-by-section analysis that also aims to show how the Genealogy holds together as an integrated whole. The Genealogy is helpfully situated within Nietzsche's wider philosophy, and occasional interludes examine supplementary topics that further enhance the reader's understanding of the text. Two chapters examine how the Genealogy relates to standard questions in moral and political philosophy. Written in a clear, accessible style, this book will appeal to students at every level coming to read the Genealogy for the first time, and a wider range of readers will also benefit from nuanced interpretations of controversial elements in Nietzsche's work.
Pratt intriguingly explores European travel and exploration writing. In a study of genre and as a critique of ideology, Imperial Eyes examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism.