Search results for ""Author Page duBois""

Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even - by the Victorians - chaste headmistress of a girls' finishing school. Yet ironically, as Page DuBois shows, the historical poet herself remains elusive. We know that Sappho's contemporary Alcaeus described her as 'violet, pure, honey-smiling Sappho'; and that the rhetorician and philosopher Maximus of Tyre saw her, perhaps less enthusiastically, as 'small and dark'. We also know that her 7th/6th century BCE island of Lesbos was riven by tyrannical and aristocratic factionalism and that she was probably exiled to Sicily. Much of the rest is speculative. DuBois suggests that the value of Sappho lies elsewhere: in her remarkable verse, and in the poet's reception - one of the richest of any figure from antiquity. Offering nuanced readings of the poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters.

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Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity: the indispensability of slaves in ancient Greece. DuBois here explores both the material culture of slavery as well as its representation in literature. Specifically, she considers the place of slaves in Plato's "Meno", Aristotle's "Politics", Aesop's "Fables", Aristophanes' "Wasps", and Euripides' "Orestes". She contends throughout that portraying the difference between slave and free as natural was pivotal to Greek concepts of selfhood and political freedom.

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Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity: the indispensability of slaves in ancient Greece. DuBois here explores both the material culture of slavery as well as its representation in literature. Specifically, she considers the place of slaves in Plato's "Meno", Aristotle's "Politics", Aesop's "Fables", Aristophanes' "Wasps", and Euripides' "Orestes". She contends throughout that portraying the difference between slave and free as natural was pivotal to Greek concepts of selfhood and political freedom.

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Sappho's poetry, dating from the seventh century BC, comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation. How is it then that this poet has come to signify so much? This study offers a different reading of the archaic lesbian poet that acknowledges the poet's distance and difference from us, whilst at the same time stresses Sappho's inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject. The author reads Sappho as a disruptive figure at the very origin of the story of Western civilization. Sappho is beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of reductively linear accounts of our common history. She is a woman, but also an aristocrat, a Greek, but one turned toward Asia, a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy, a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality, nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named as the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She questions many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. The work argues that the reader needs to read Sappho again.

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Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics. With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy. Ancient comedy has been underplayed in the study of Greek drama. Yet, with the irrepressible energy of the comic swarm, it provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. Using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, duBois augments tragic thought with the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy, and she connects the lively anti-authoritarianism of the ancient comic chorus with the social justice movements of today.

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