Books by Jacqueline J . H . Klooster
Alles moet anders, 2022
Als je het vraagt aan de auteurs van de Nederlandse Boekengids, dan moet alles anders. De politie... more Als je het vraagt aan de auteurs van de Nederlandse Boekengids, dan moet alles anders. De politiek, het onderwijs, de zorg, de economie, de kunst. Ja, echt alles. Alles moet anders is een selectie van de 25 meest vernieuwende, felle, hemelbestormende stukken van de afgelopen vijf jaar. Want alles moet inderdaad anders, en dat begint met lezen en denken. Merlijn Olnon is oprichtend hoofdredacteur en uitgever van de Nederlandse Boekengids.
It is a well-known and striking fact that Hellenistic Poetry is
full of powerful and powerfully p... more It is a well-known and striking fact that Hellenistic Poetry is
full of powerful and powerfully present women, ranging from
Ptolemaic and other queens, to female (semi-divinities) and
epic heroines. But the Hellenistic era is likewise remarkable
for being relatively rich in female authors, specifically in the
domain of epigrammatic poetry. This volume sets out to broach
not only the question who the powerful women of Hellenistic
poetry were, and what their power consisted of, but also, quite
emphatically, in what ways they differ from or resemble previous
literary representations of women in, for example, Homeric
epic, archaic lyric and Athenian tragedy, and why.
Emotions are at the core of much ancient literature, from Achilles’ heartfelt anger in Homer’s Il... more Emotions are at the core of much ancient literature, from Achilles’ heartfelt anger in Homer’s Iliad to the pangs of love of Virgil’s Dido. This volume applies a narratological approach to emotions in a wide range of texts and genres. It seeks to analyze ways in which emotions such as anger, fear, pity, joy, love and sadness are portrayed. Furthermore, using recent insights from affective narratology, it studies ways in which ancient narratives evoke emotions in their readers. The volume is dedicated to Irene de Jong for her groundbreaking research into the narratology of ancient literature.
[If you follow the link, you can read the book through open access]
https://brill.com/view/title/... more [If you follow the link, you can read the book through open access]
https://brill.com/view/title/61226
Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins. Rather, in inventing origin stories they authorise the present and try to shape the future. This book explores aetiology as a tool for thinking, and draws attention to the paradoxical structure of origin stories. Aetiologies reduce complex ambivalence and plurality to plainly causal and temporal relations, but at the same time, by casting an anchor into the past, they open doors to progress and innovation.
Crises resulting from war or other upheavals turn the lives of individuals upside down, and they ... more Crises resulting from war or other upheavals turn the lives of individuals upside down, and they can leave marks on a community for many years after the event. This volume aims to explore how such crises were remembered in the ancient world, and how communities reconstituted themselves after a crisis. Can crises serve as catalysts for innovation or change, and how does this work? What do crises reveal about the 'normality' against which they are defined and framed?
People living in post-crisis societies have no choice but to adapt to the changes caused by crisis. Such adaptation entails the question of how the relationship between the pre-crisis situation and the new status quo is constructed, and by whom. Due to the reduced possibility of using the immediate past, which is tainted by conflict and bad memories, it may involve revisions of historical narratives about communal pasts and identities, through the selection of new 'anchors', and sometimes even a discarding of the old ones.
Crises affect all areas of life, and crisis recovery likewise spans different spheres. This volume finds traces of such recovery strategies in texts as well as visual representations; in literary as well as in documentary texts; in official ideology as much as in subaltern responses. The contributors bring together the diverse testimonies for such ways of coping that have survived from antiquity.
Acknowledgements
Part I: Crisis: Concepts & Ideology
1) Introduction: What is a Crisis? Framing versus Experience
Jacqueline Klooster (University of Groningen, Netherlands) and Inger Kuin (Dartmouth College, USA)
2) (Not) talkin' bout a revolution: Managing constitutional crisis in Athenian political thought
Tim Whitmarsh (University of Cambridge, UK)
3) Security: calming the soul political in the wake of civil war
Michèle Lowrie (University of Chicago, USA)
Part II: Crisis Traumas & Recovery: Greece
4) Tragedies of War in Duris and Phylarchus: social memory and experiential history
Lisa Hau (Glasgow University, UK)
5) Changes of Fortune: Polybius and the Transformation of Greece
Andrew Erskine (Edinburgh University, UK)
Part III: Crisis Traumas & Recovery: Rome
6) Coping With Crisis: Sulla's Civil War and Roman Cultural Identity
Alexandra Eckert (Oldenburg University, Germany)
7) Alternative Futures in Lucan's Bellum Civile: Imagining Aftermaths of Civil War
Annemarie Ambühl (Mainz University, Germany)
Part IV: Resolving Civil War
8) Caesar and the Crisis of Corfinium
Luca Grillo (University of North Carolina, USA)
9) Young Caesar and the Termination of Civil War (31–27 BCE)
Carsten Hjort Lange (Aalborg University, Denmark)
10) Agrippa's odd Speech in Cassius Dio's Roman History
Mathieu de Bakker (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Part IV: Civil War & the Family
11) The Fate of the Lepidani: Civil War and Family History in First Century BCE Rome
Josiah Osgood (Georgetown University, USA)
12) The Roman Family as Institution and Metaphor After the Civil Wars
Andrew Gallia (University of Minnesota, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
“A highly impressive collection of scholarship by leading experts that reminds us in the modern world, that antiquity too was characterised by crises, yet, despite the marks such challenges leave, crises must necessarily pass, communities can recover and they do reconstitute themselves.” – Jason Crowley, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK,
This special volume of the Hellenistica Groningana, in honour
of the achievements and career of P... more This special volume of the Hellenistica Groningana, in honour
of the achievements and career of Professor M.A. Harder
revisits the poetry of Callimachus (theme of two earlier Hellenistic
Workshops).
A number of renowned international scholars in the field of
Hellenistic studies reflect on new perspectives in Callimachean
scholarship inspired, among others, by Annette Harder’s 2012
edition of Callimachus’ Aetia. Their questions aim to contextualize
and analyze Callimachus’ poetry in novel ways, inspired
by both new literary theory and historical insights and a solid
body of existing scholarship. How do Callimachus’ learned
elegies relate to the genre of didactic poetry? How do his
aetiological narratives straddle the border between fiction and
reality? What is their basis in Hellenistic scholarship, and in
Near Eastern or Egyptian poetic traditions? How and why do
later Greek poets incorporate Callimachean poetics, and so
facilitate his reception in Latin poetry? What is Callimachus’
attitude to gods and divine rulers in his hymnic poetry? These
and many more questions are addressed, creating new perspectives
in Callimachean scholarship, as the title indicates.
Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond focuses on the important question of how and why... more Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond focuses on the important question of how and why later authors employ Homeric poetry to reflect on various types and aspects of leadership. In a range of essays discussing generically diverse receptions of the epics of Homer in historically diverse contexts, this question is answered in various ways. Rather than considering Homer’s works as literary products, then, this volume discusses the pedagogic dimension of the Iliad and the Odyssey as perceived by later thinkers and writers interested in the parameters of good rule, such as Plato, Philodemus, Polybius, Vergil, and Eustathios.
Waarom is een nieuwe Homerusvertaling een literaire gebeurtenis? Waarom wordt Vergilius nog altij... more Waarom is een nieuwe Homerusvertaling een literaire gebeurtenis? Waarom wordt Vergilius nog altijd op school gelezen? Wat maakt klassieke literatuur zo interessant en zo 'klassiek'?
In het Elementaire Deeltje Klassieke literatuur gaat Jacqueline Klooster in op de essentie en de verbazingwekkende vitaliteit van de klassieke literatuur (zowel Grieks als Romeins) en onze fascinatie ervoor. Dit doet zij niet per genre, zoals vaker is gedaan, maar chronologisch, om ook de context waarin de werken ontstonden te belichten. Zo laat zij zien hoe de klassieken zich door imitatie en innovatie ontwikkelden tot literatuur die wij nog altijd willen lezen.
Hellenistic Poetry has enjoyed a notable re-appreciation in recent years and received ample schol... more Hellenistic Poetry has enjoyed a notable re-appreciation in recent years and received ample scholarly discussion, especially focusing on its reception and innovation of Greek poetic tradition. This book wishes to add to our picture of how Hellenistic poetry works by looking at it from a slightly different angle. Concentrating on the interaction between contemporary poets, it attempts to view the dynamics of imitation and reception in the light of poetical self-positioning. In the courtly Alexandrian surroundings, choosing a poetic model and affiliation determines one's position in the cultural field. This book sets out to chart, not only the well-known complexities of handling the poetic past, but especially their relation to the poetic interaction of the Hellenistic, in particular Alexandrian poets.
Open access at: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=498512
Eds. J.G.M. Heirman and J.J.H. Klo... more Open access at: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=498512
Eds. J.G.M. Heirman and J.J.H. Klooster
In a brief essay called Des espaces autres (1984) Michel Foucault announced that after the nineteenth century, which was dominated by a historical outlook, the current century might rather be the century of space. His prophecy has been fulfilled: the end of the twentieth century witnessed a “spatial turn” in humanities which was perhaps partly due to the globalisation of our modern world.
open access at: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=498512
Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities, this volume presents a number of essays on the ideological role of space in literary texts. The individual articles analyse ancient and modern literary texts from the angle of the most recent theoretical conceptualisations of space. The focus throughout is on how the experience of space is determined by dominant political, philosophical or religious ideologies and how, in turn, the description of spaces in literature is employed to express, broadcast or deconstruct this experience. By bringing together ancient and modern, mostly post-colonial texts, this volume hopes to stimulate discussion among disciplines and across continents. Among the authors discussed are: Homer, Nonnus, Alcaeus of Lesbos, Apollonius of Rhodes, Vergil, Herodotus, Panagiotis Soutsos, Assia Djebar, Tahar Djaout, Olive Senior, Jamaica Kincaid, Stefan Heym, Benoit Dutuertre,Henrik Stangerup and David Malouf.
Papers and book chapters by Jacqueline J . H . Klooster
Inventing Origins? Aetiological Thinking in Greek and Roman Antiquity, 2021
I start by addressing the question why aetiology and prophecy seemingly ‘belong together’ in the ... more I start by addressing the question why aetiology and prophecy seemingly ‘belong together’ in the ancient mind. In order to do so, I will look into the structure of aetiology and prophecy as narrative modes, or Denkformen. In particular I will ask: what do these narrative forms aim at, and how do they reach their goal? This involves a look at ancient divinatory practices. Secondly, I will argue that both prophecy and aetiology are related to allegorical speech in that they both, in their different ways, proceed by providing a symbolic representation of ‘truth’. This may help explain why the two often occur together.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
In this contribution, I look at the Thera-episode in Apollonius Rhodius (IV 1731-
1764) from the ... more In this contribution, I look at the Thera-episode in Apollonius Rhodius (IV 1731-
1764) from the point of view of the poetic interaction between Callimachus and
Apollonius as sketched by Annette Harder. I first briefly review scholarly findings
about the ideological significance of the Thera-episode in Apollonius’ Argonautica,
following Stephens 2011 and others. I then go into the importance of Thera (and
the Cyrenaean foundation story in general) for Callimachus. The theme features
not only in his Apollo Hymn and Aetia fr. 7c, 1-5, but in several other Callimachean
poetic fragments as well.
Next, I will point out what I believe is a neglected element of the Herodotean subtext of Apollonius’ Thera episode, the story of Phronime in Hdt IV, 154. Finally
I present a reading of the Apollonian passage which takes into account both the
importance of Callimachus’ Cyrenean connections and the neglected Herodotean
subtext.
De Nederlandse Boekengids, 2020
Ferrante als klassieker
De kluwen en draden, de thematische consistentie van het doolhof-de intr... more Ferrante als klassieker
De kluwen en draden, de thematische consistentie van het doolhof-de intrigerende ambivalentie en gelaagdheid in het werk van Elena Ferrante hebben geleid tot een ware hausse. De moderne, afwezige auteur bij uitstek, schrijft Jacqueline Klooster. Maar wie en waar is Ferrante eigenlijk? * Abonnees lezen meer. Neem ook een abonnement! * Essay uit dNBg 2020#6
amphora, 2018
Naar aanleiding van de presentatie van de prachtige nieuwe educatieve website 'Rondom Pericles' (... more Naar aanleiding van de presentatie van de prachtige nieuwe educatieve website 'Rondom Pericles' (www.rondompericles.nl) 1 , die zich richt op het verhelderen – door commentaar, vertaling en achtergronden – van de beroemde Lijkrede van Pericles, uit het tweede boek van Thucydides' Historiën, is het goed om eens stil te staan bij de vraag: waarom zouden we Thucydides moeten lezen? En, niet onbelangrijk: hoe?
This is the first page of the Introduction to the edited Volume Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiq... more This is the first page of the Introduction to the edited Volume Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond. It treats the development of Princes' Mirrors and the Reception of Homeric Epic as text about good leadership. If you need a copy of the full version, leave a message.
This is the first page of an article on the reception of Phoenix' famous words (the Homeric hero ... more This is the first page of an article on the reception of Phoenix' famous words (the Homeric hero should be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds). If you need the full version, please leave a message.
Aitia. Regards sur la culture Hellénistique au XXIe siècle., 2017
This paper investigates how Suetonius uses his representation of the literary taste of the empero... more This paper investigates how Suetonius uses his representation of the literary taste of the emperor Tiberius to characterize him. Tiberius allegedly loved and imitated Hellenistic poets (Euphorion, Rhianus and Parthenius). How does this characterize him? Another question is whether this taste is modern or old-fashioned in comparison with the tastes of his contemporaries, in particular his predecessor Augustus. Finally I ask whether the fact that a similar literary taste (partly for the same authors) is attributed in the biographical tradition to Hadrian can be connected to Suetonius’ account of Tiberius’ literary interests.
Solon is the subject of both a Plutarchan biography (Solon) and a philosophical dialogue (Convivi... more Solon is the subject of both a Plutarchan biography (Solon) and a philosophical dialogue (Convivium septem sapientium). In this article I argue that Plutarch creates a precedent for his authorial persona of wise but modest adviser of the ruling class under the Roman empire in the figure of the Athenian sage Solon, presumably inspired by the fact that Herodotus used Solon as a text-internal alter ego. To this end I analyze in particular how Plutarch represents Solon’s way of dealing with rulers and tyrants (Pisistratus, Philocyprus, Croesus, Periander). I ask whether in this Solon can be considered successful or not, and why. I submit that Plutarch’s representation of Solon aims to provide authority to some of the remarkable aspects of his authorial persona, in particular its emphatic modesty and pragmatism with regard to absolute rule. Plutarch does this in particular by showing that it was a time-honoured and respectable practice for wise Greeks to act as advisor to rulers, even tyrants.
The article is published in Mnemosyne. If you want the full text, let me know.
In how far does place, that is to say, the original geographical, spatial context associated with... more In how far does place, that is to say, the original geographical, spatial context associated with an author, contribute to the authenticity of a literary experience? In other words, how and why are the original (geographical) context and local tradition important for the appreciation, creation, or adaptation of a specific type of poetry? Did the ancient Greeks and Romans really feel they needed to visit Athens to understand Plato, or for instance, Lesbos to appreciate, imitate or emulate Sappho? How is this issue reflected in literary texts and testimonia?
I will look in particular at some Hellenistic poets and their approach to this question. The paradox, especially when we think of the Alexandrian scholar-poets, in their situation is clear: they possessed, to a greater extent than anyone reading or writing before their age, accessible and specialized critical and biographical information about poets of the past, who were culturally and geographically as well as temporally remote from their own context
Introduction for a Dutch translation of Appian's Civil Wars
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Books by Jacqueline J . H . Klooster
full of powerful and powerfully present women, ranging from
Ptolemaic and other queens, to female (semi-divinities) and
epic heroines. But the Hellenistic era is likewise remarkable
for being relatively rich in female authors, specifically in the
domain of epigrammatic poetry. This volume sets out to broach
not only the question who the powerful women of Hellenistic
poetry were, and what their power consisted of, but also, quite
emphatically, in what ways they differ from or resemble previous
literary representations of women in, for example, Homeric
epic, archaic lyric and Athenian tragedy, and why.
https://brill.com/view/title/61226
Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins. Rather, in inventing origin stories they authorise the present and try to shape the future. This book explores aetiology as a tool for thinking, and draws attention to the paradoxical structure of origin stories. Aetiologies reduce complex ambivalence and plurality to plainly causal and temporal relations, but at the same time, by casting an anchor into the past, they open doors to progress and innovation.
People living in post-crisis societies have no choice but to adapt to the changes caused by crisis. Such adaptation entails the question of how the relationship between the pre-crisis situation and the new status quo is constructed, and by whom. Due to the reduced possibility of using the immediate past, which is tainted by conflict and bad memories, it may involve revisions of historical narratives about communal pasts and identities, through the selection of new 'anchors', and sometimes even a discarding of the old ones.
Crises affect all areas of life, and crisis recovery likewise spans different spheres. This volume finds traces of such recovery strategies in texts as well as visual representations; in literary as well as in documentary texts; in official ideology as much as in subaltern responses. The contributors bring together the diverse testimonies for such ways of coping that have survived from antiquity.
Acknowledgements
Part I: Crisis: Concepts & Ideology
1) Introduction: What is a Crisis? Framing versus Experience
Jacqueline Klooster (University of Groningen, Netherlands) and Inger Kuin (Dartmouth College, USA)
2) (Not) talkin' bout a revolution: Managing constitutional crisis in Athenian political thought
Tim Whitmarsh (University of Cambridge, UK)
3) Security: calming the soul political in the wake of civil war
Michèle Lowrie (University of Chicago, USA)
Part II: Crisis Traumas & Recovery: Greece
4) Tragedies of War in Duris and Phylarchus: social memory and experiential history
Lisa Hau (Glasgow University, UK)
5) Changes of Fortune: Polybius and the Transformation of Greece
Andrew Erskine (Edinburgh University, UK)
Part III: Crisis Traumas & Recovery: Rome
6) Coping With Crisis: Sulla's Civil War and Roman Cultural Identity
Alexandra Eckert (Oldenburg University, Germany)
7) Alternative Futures in Lucan's Bellum Civile: Imagining Aftermaths of Civil War
Annemarie Ambühl (Mainz University, Germany)
Part IV: Resolving Civil War
8) Caesar and the Crisis of Corfinium
Luca Grillo (University of North Carolina, USA)
9) Young Caesar and the Termination of Civil War (31–27 BCE)
Carsten Hjort Lange (Aalborg University, Denmark)
10) Agrippa's odd Speech in Cassius Dio's Roman History
Mathieu de Bakker (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Part IV: Civil War & the Family
11) The Fate of the Lepidani: Civil War and Family History in First Century BCE Rome
Josiah Osgood (Georgetown University, USA)
12) The Roman Family as Institution and Metaphor After the Civil Wars
Andrew Gallia (University of Minnesota, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
“A highly impressive collection of scholarship by leading experts that reminds us in the modern world, that antiquity too was characterised by crises, yet, despite the marks such challenges leave, crises must necessarily pass, communities can recover and they do reconstitute themselves.” – Jason Crowley, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK,
of the achievements and career of Professor M.A. Harder
revisits the poetry of Callimachus (theme of two earlier Hellenistic
Workshops).
A number of renowned international scholars in the field of
Hellenistic studies reflect on new perspectives in Callimachean
scholarship inspired, among others, by Annette Harder’s 2012
edition of Callimachus’ Aetia. Their questions aim to contextualize
and analyze Callimachus’ poetry in novel ways, inspired
by both new literary theory and historical insights and a solid
body of existing scholarship. How do Callimachus’ learned
elegies relate to the genre of didactic poetry? How do his
aetiological narratives straddle the border between fiction and
reality? What is their basis in Hellenistic scholarship, and in
Near Eastern or Egyptian poetic traditions? How and why do
later Greek poets incorporate Callimachean poetics, and so
facilitate his reception in Latin poetry? What is Callimachus’
attitude to gods and divine rulers in his hymnic poetry? These
and many more questions are addressed, creating new perspectives
in Callimachean scholarship, as the title indicates.
In het Elementaire Deeltje Klassieke literatuur gaat Jacqueline Klooster in op de essentie en de verbazingwekkende vitaliteit van de klassieke literatuur (zowel Grieks als Romeins) en onze fascinatie ervoor. Dit doet zij niet per genre, zoals vaker is gedaan, maar chronologisch, om ook de context waarin de werken ontstonden te belichten. Zo laat zij zien hoe de klassieken zich door imitatie en innovatie ontwikkelden tot literatuur die wij nog altijd willen lezen.
Eds. J.G.M. Heirman and J.J.H. Klooster
In a brief essay called Des espaces autres (1984) Michel Foucault announced that after the nineteenth century, which was dominated by a historical outlook, the current century might rather be the century of space. His prophecy has been fulfilled: the end of the twentieth century witnessed a “spatial turn” in humanities which was perhaps partly due to the globalisation of our modern world.
open access at: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=498512
Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities, this volume presents a number of essays on the ideological role of space in literary texts. The individual articles analyse ancient and modern literary texts from the angle of the most recent theoretical conceptualisations of space. The focus throughout is on how the experience of space is determined by dominant political, philosophical or religious ideologies and how, in turn, the description of spaces in literature is employed to express, broadcast or deconstruct this experience. By bringing together ancient and modern, mostly post-colonial texts, this volume hopes to stimulate discussion among disciplines and across continents. Among the authors discussed are: Homer, Nonnus, Alcaeus of Lesbos, Apollonius of Rhodes, Vergil, Herodotus, Panagiotis Soutsos, Assia Djebar, Tahar Djaout, Olive Senior, Jamaica Kincaid, Stefan Heym, Benoit Dutuertre,Henrik Stangerup and David Malouf.
Papers and book chapters by Jacqueline J . H . Klooster
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
1764) from the point of view of the poetic interaction between Callimachus and
Apollonius as sketched by Annette Harder. I first briefly review scholarly findings
about the ideological significance of the Thera-episode in Apollonius’ Argonautica,
following Stephens 2011 and others. I then go into the importance of Thera (and
the Cyrenaean foundation story in general) for Callimachus. The theme features
not only in his Apollo Hymn and Aetia fr. 7c, 1-5, but in several other Callimachean
poetic fragments as well.
Next, I will point out what I believe is a neglected element of the Herodotean subtext of Apollonius’ Thera episode, the story of Phronime in Hdt IV, 154. Finally
I present a reading of the Apollonian passage which takes into account both the
importance of Callimachus’ Cyrenean connections and the neglected Herodotean
subtext.
De kluwen en draden, de thematische consistentie van het doolhof-de intrigerende ambivalentie en gelaagdheid in het werk van Elena Ferrante hebben geleid tot een ware hausse. De moderne, afwezige auteur bij uitstek, schrijft Jacqueline Klooster. Maar wie en waar is Ferrante eigenlijk? * Abonnees lezen meer. Neem ook een abonnement! * Essay uit dNBg 2020#6
The article is published in Mnemosyne. If you want the full text, let me know.
I will look in particular at some Hellenistic poets and their approach to this question. The paradox, especially when we think of the Alexandrian scholar-poets, in their situation is clear: they possessed, to a greater extent than anyone reading or writing before their age, accessible and specialized critical and biographical information about poets of the past, who were culturally and geographically as well as temporally remote from their own context
full of powerful and powerfully present women, ranging from
Ptolemaic and other queens, to female (semi-divinities) and
epic heroines. But the Hellenistic era is likewise remarkable
for being relatively rich in female authors, specifically in the
domain of epigrammatic poetry. This volume sets out to broach
not only the question who the powerful women of Hellenistic
poetry were, and what their power consisted of, but also, quite
emphatically, in what ways they differ from or resemble previous
literary representations of women in, for example, Homeric
epic, archaic lyric and Athenian tragedy, and why.
https://brill.com/view/title/61226
Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins. Rather, in inventing origin stories they authorise the present and try to shape the future. This book explores aetiology as a tool for thinking, and draws attention to the paradoxical structure of origin stories. Aetiologies reduce complex ambivalence and plurality to plainly causal and temporal relations, but at the same time, by casting an anchor into the past, they open doors to progress and innovation.
People living in post-crisis societies have no choice but to adapt to the changes caused by crisis. Such adaptation entails the question of how the relationship between the pre-crisis situation and the new status quo is constructed, and by whom. Due to the reduced possibility of using the immediate past, which is tainted by conflict and bad memories, it may involve revisions of historical narratives about communal pasts and identities, through the selection of new 'anchors', and sometimes even a discarding of the old ones.
Crises affect all areas of life, and crisis recovery likewise spans different spheres. This volume finds traces of such recovery strategies in texts as well as visual representations; in literary as well as in documentary texts; in official ideology as much as in subaltern responses. The contributors bring together the diverse testimonies for such ways of coping that have survived from antiquity.
Acknowledgements
Part I: Crisis: Concepts & Ideology
1) Introduction: What is a Crisis? Framing versus Experience
Jacqueline Klooster (University of Groningen, Netherlands) and Inger Kuin (Dartmouth College, USA)
2) (Not) talkin' bout a revolution: Managing constitutional crisis in Athenian political thought
Tim Whitmarsh (University of Cambridge, UK)
3) Security: calming the soul political in the wake of civil war
Michèle Lowrie (University of Chicago, USA)
Part II: Crisis Traumas & Recovery: Greece
4) Tragedies of War in Duris and Phylarchus: social memory and experiential history
Lisa Hau (Glasgow University, UK)
5) Changes of Fortune: Polybius and the Transformation of Greece
Andrew Erskine (Edinburgh University, UK)
Part III: Crisis Traumas & Recovery: Rome
6) Coping With Crisis: Sulla's Civil War and Roman Cultural Identity
Alexandra Eckert (Oldenburg University, Germany)
7) Alternative Futures in Lucan's Bellum Civile: Imagining Aftermaths of Civil War
Annemarie Ambühl (Mainz University, Germany)
Part IV: Resolving Civil War
8) Caesar and the Crisis of Corfinium
Luca Grillo (University of North Carolina, USA)
9) Young Caesar and the Termination of Civil War (31–27 BCE)
Carsten Hjort Lange (Aalborg University, Denmark)
10) Agrippa's odd Speech in Cassius Dio's Roman History
Mathieu de Bakker (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Part IV: Civil War & the Family
11) The Fate of the Lepidani: Civil War and Family History in First Century BCE Rome
Josiah Osgood (Georgetown University, USA)
12) The Roman Family as Institution and Metaphor After the Civil Wars
Andrew Gallia (University of Minnesota, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
“A highly impressive collection of scholarship by leading experts that reminds us in the modern world, that antiquity too was characterised by crises, yet, despite the marks such challenges leave, crises must necessarily pass, communities can recover and they do reconstitute themselves.” – Jason Crowley, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK,
of the achievements and career of Professor M.A. Harder
revisits the poetry of Callimachus (theme of two earlier Hellenistic
Workshops).
A number of renowned international scholars in the field of
Hellenistic studies reflect on new perspectives in Callimachean
scholarship inspired, among others, by Annette Harder’s 2012
edition of Callimachus’ Aetia. Their questions aim to contextualize
and analyze Callimachus’ poetry in novel ways, inspired
by both new literary theory and historical insights and a solid
body of existing scholarship. How do Callimachus’ learned
elegies relate to the genre of didactic poetry? How do his
aetiological narratives straddle the border between fiction and
reality? What is their basis in Hellenistic scholarship, and in
Near Eastern or Egyptian poetic traditions? How and why do
later Greek poets incorporate Callimachean poetics, and so
facilitate his reception in Latin poetry? What is Callimachus’
attitude to gods and divine rulers in his hymnic poetry? These
and many more questions are addressed, creating new perspectives
in Callimachean scholarship, as the title indicates.
In het Elementaire Deeltje Klassieke literatuur gaat Jacqueline Klooster in op de essentie en de verbazingwekkende vitaliteit van de klassieke literatuur (zowel Grieks als Romeins) en onze fascinatie ervoor. Dit doet zij niet per genre, zoals vaker is gedaan, maar chronologisch, om ook de context waarin de werken ontstonden te belichten. Zo laat zij zien hoe de klassieken zich door imitatie en innovatie ontwikkelden tot literatuur die wij nog altijd willen lezen.
Eds. J.G.M. Heirman and J.J.H. Klooster
In a brief essay called Des espaces autres (1984) Michel Foucault announced that after the nineteenth century, which was dominated by a historical outlook, the current century might rather be the century of space. His prophecy has been fulfilled: the end of the twentieth century witnessed a “spatial turn” in humanities which was perhaps partly due to the globalisation of our modern world.
open access at: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=498512
Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities, this volume presents a number of essays on the ideological role of space in literary texts. The individual articles analyse ancient and modern literary texts from the angle of the most recent theoretical conceptualisations of space. The focus throughout is on how the experience of space is determined by dominant political, philosophical or religious ideologies and how, in turn, the description of spaces in literature is employed to express, broadcast or deconstruct this experience. By bringing together ancient and modern, mostly post-colonial texts, this volume hopes to stimulate discussion among disciplines and across continents. Among the authors discussed are: Homer, Nonnus, Alcaeus of Lesbos, Apollonius of Rhodes, Vergil, Herodotus, Panagiotis Soutsos, Assia Djebar, Tahar Djaout, Olive Senior, Jamaica Kincaid, Stefan Heym, Benoit Dutuertre,Henrik Stangerup and David Malouf.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
1764) from the point of view of the poetic interaction between Callimachus and
Apollonius as sketched by Annette Harder. I first briefly review scholarly findings
about the ideological significance of the Thera-episode in Apollonius’ Argonautica,
following Stephens 2011 and others. I then go into the importance of Thera (and
the Cyrenaean foundation story in general) for Callimachus. The theme features
not only in his Apollo Hymn and Aetia fr. 7c, 1-5, but in several other Callimachean
poetic fragments as well.
Next, I will point out what I believe is a neglected element of the Herodotean subtext of Apollonius’ Thera episode, the story of Phronime in Hdt IV, 154. Finally
I present a reading of the Apollonian passage which takes into account both the
importance of Callimachus’ Cyrenean connections and the neglected Herodotean
subtext.
De kluwen en draden, de thematische consistentie van het doolhof-de intrigerende ambivalentie en gelaagdheid in het werk van Elena Ferrante hebben geleid tot een ware hausse. De moderne, afwezige auteur bij uitstek, schrijft Jacqueline Klooster. Maar wie en waar is Ferrante eigenlijk? * Abonnees lezen meer. Neem ook een abonnement! * Essay uit dNBg 2020#6
The article is published in Mnemosyne. If you want the full text, let me know.
I will look in particular at some Hellenistic poets and their approach to this question. The paradox, especially when we think of the Alexandrian scholar-poets, in their situation is clear: they possessed, to a greater extent than anyone reading or writing before their age, accessible and specialized critical and biographical information about poets of the past, who were culturally and geographically as well as temporally remote from their own context
sages, datable to the 7th century BC, feature in many anecdotes in historiography,
philosophy and biography (Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius). One
topic in the stories about their lives is of particular interest to me: the texts (sayings,
poetry and prose works) that were attributed to the Seven Sages by various
sources. Why did they write these texts, or why where they attributed to them,
and in what way can they be connected to the Sages’ reputation for wisdom and
political savoir faire?
December 4, 2015, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Location: Van Swinderenhuis, Oude Boteringestraat 19, Glazen Zaal
Session 1: Uncertainty, Anchoring, and Innovation in Politics, 11:00-12:30
Chair: Ruurd Nauta (RUG)
11:00 - 11:30 Luis Lobo-Guerrero (RUG): “Thinking about the politics of uncertainty”
11:30 - 12:00 Inger Kuin (RUG): “Change and innovation in ancient politics”
12:00 - 12:30 Jacqueline Klooster (RUG): “Anchoring political concepts in Plutarch”
Session 2: Trauma and Memory in History, 13:30-15:00
Chair: Onno van Nijf (RUG)
13:30 - 14:00 Raf Praet (RUG): “Anchoring traumas of the present in the distant past. The use of prophesies in John of Lydia and John Malalas”
14:00 - 14:30 Alexandra Eckert (Oldenburg): “Trauma as a Social Experience: Remembering Sulla’s Atrocities”
14:30 - 15:00 Benjamin Herborth (RUG): “Inventing Pasts that Shape Us: Notes on the Politics of Historical Memory”
Session 3: War, Justice, and Reconciliation, 15:30-16:30
Chair: Bettina Reitz-Joosse (RUG)
15:30 - 16:00 David van der Linden (RUG): “Historicizing Transitional Justice: An Early Modern Perspective on Postwar Reconciliation”
16:00 – 16:30 Claartje Wesselink (UvA): “ ‘Liberated’ art for a liberated country. The politicisation of realism and abstraction in the Netherlands after the Second World War”
Panel discussion 16:30-17:00
Drinks 17:00-18:00
Dinner 18:00
Program and registration at www.afterthecrisis.nl
Or contact the organizers: Inger Kuin (N.I.Kuin@rug.nl)
Jacqueline Klooster (J.J.H.Klooster@rug.nl)
In a brief essay called ‘Des espaces autres’ which was written in 1967 but published in 1984 Michel Foucault announced that after the nineteenth century, which was dominated by a historical outlook, “l’époque actuelle serait peut-être plutôt l’époque de l’espace”. His prophecy has been fulfilled: the end of the twentieth century witnessed a “spatial turn” in humanities, which was perhaps partly due to the globalization of our modern world. This shift in attention from time to space is noticeable in particular in literary theory. Until recently space was neglected in favour of time as parameter of literary analysis. This was in the first place due to the influential claim made by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoon (1766) that literature is essentially a temporal art - as opposed to spatial arts, such as painting or sculpture. A second reason given is that space in literary fiction was often considered to have no other function “than to supply a general background against which the action takes place, something to be taken for granted rather than requiring attention”. From the end of the twentieth century onwards, however, space has become a ‘hot topic’ in literary studies. Numerous monographies have appeared on space in a specific period, genre or author: for instance, on space in the ancient novel (Paschalis-Frangaloudis 2002), space in modern Arabic literature (Hallaq a.o. 2002), Russian fiction (Joe 2007), and mediaeval literature (Störmer-Caysa 2007). Currently, the representation of space in various literary genres is the theme of a number of research projects worldwide, among which the NWO-funded research group supervised by Prof. Irene de Jong at Amsterdam University. This project, which forms part of the larger project Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, analyses the representation of space in ancient Greek narrative texts from a narratological angle, based on the theories of Genette and Bal. While Irene de Jong focuses on space in Homer, other members of the project at the University of Amsterdam discuss space in Hellenistic poetry (Jacqueline Klooster), historiographic and rhetoric prose (Mathieu de Bakker), archaic lyric (Jo Heirman), tragedy (Paul van Uum), and spatial description or ecphrasis (Niels Koopman). A brief survey of each of these subjects can be found below.
NEW: COLLOQUIUM SPACE AND LITERATURE, AMSTERDAM 26-27 MAY 2011
This colloquium wishes to bring together the fields of classical (Greco-Roman) and modern literature. By provoking debates on similarities, continuities or differences in the function of literary space we hope that this encounter may cross-fertilize (the study of space in) both fields. To this end, we focus in particular on four themes. A first theme concerns the textuality of space. This takes its cue from such theories as the ‘possible worlds theory’ (Ryan 1991 and Ronen 1994), ‘text world theory’ (Werth 1999 and Gavins 2007), and the concept of ‘storyworlds’ (Herman 2009). Questions we wish to address are how the textual medium affects the presentation of space and how this relates to the space outside the text: is the fictional or textual world a referential world which parallels the world outside the text? Or is it a newly created, symbolic world which conflicts with that outside the text and can only exist in the imagination? Speakers include Jo Heirman, Elton Barker, Joanna Gavins and Jan Hein Hoogstad. A second theme regards the relationship between time and space. Bakhtin’s chronotope theory (see Bakhtin 1981 (1938); Keunen 2007; Bemong-Borghart-a.o. forthc.) has evinced that time and space are inextricably bound to each other: the way time is employed influences the spatial presentation and vice versa. We may think here of space of the present in relation to memory or functioning as a ‘lieu de mémoire’ (see Nora 1984-1992). But what happens if space and time conflict with each other in terms of anachronism, or if space is dissociated from time? Speakers include Paul van Uum, Suzanne Adema, Esther Peeren and Bart Keunen. A third theme centers on the combined concepts of Lived or Living Spaces. Under this header we would invite treatments of space as both an active participant in the shaping of stories, influencing the human characters (e.g. as in the theories of Lefebvre), or as endowed by narrators with human qualities (pathetic fallacy, personification). Speakers include Bettina Reitz, Isabel Höving and Käti Röttger. Finally we would like to address the theme of Landscape and Imperialism. This broad theme begins from the question of how power structures space into a landscape, or how this attempt is deconstructed, especially in colonial and postcolonial narrative, from both the side of the colonizer and the colonized. Speakers include Jacqueline Klooster, Pavlina Saoulidou, Murat Aydemir and Hilary Dannenberg.