Cultural Poetics In Archaic Greece

This book brings together essays by archaeologists, historians, and literature scholars as an interdisciplinary examination of the Greek archaic age.

This volume brings together essays by archaeologists, historians, and literary scholars in a comprehensive examination of the Greek archaic age. A time of dramatic and revolutionary change when many of the institutions and thought patterns that would shape Greek culture evolved, this period has become the object of renewed scholarly interest in recent years. Yet it has resisted reconstruction, largely because its documentation is less complete than that of the classical period. In order to read the text of archaic Greece, the contributors here apply new methods--including anthropology, literary theory, and cultural history--to central issues, among them the interpretation of ritual, the origins of hero cult and its relation to politics, the evolving ideologies of colonization and athletic victory, the representation of statesmen and sages, and the serendipitous development of democracy. With their interdisciplinary approaches, the various essays demonstrate the interdependence of politics, religion, and economics in this period; the importance of public performance for negotiating social interaction; and the creative use of the past to structure a changing present. Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece offers a vigorous and coherent response to the scholarly challenges of the archaic period.

A paperback reprint of a hardback originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and derived from a conference held at Wellesley in 1990. It aims to represent a critical milestone in the cultural poetics movement, which lies at the intersection of New Historicism and classical studies.

Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continued to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled. This book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement. Unique in its focus on issues of representation and colonial ideology, rather than the traditional historical approach, this book adds much to the study of the archaic colonization movement. Through new historicist readings, Carol Dougherty shows how, long after the Greek colonization movement itself was over, the colonial tale, embedded in important poetic genres and performed as part of significant civic occasions, enabled the Greeks to continue to colonize the past and to establish themselves as the imperial power in that cultural memory.

The invention of coinage in ancient Greece provided an arena in which rival political groups struggled to imprint their views on the world. Here Leslie Kurke analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in the archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, she traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the polis, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. The argument thus aims to contribute to a Greek "history of ideologies," to chart the ways ideological contestation works through concrete discourses and practices long before the emergence of explicit political theory. To an elitist sensibility, the use of almost pure silver stamped with the state's emblem was a suspicious alternative to the para-political order of gift exchange. It ultimately represented the undesirable encroachment of the public sphere of the egalitarian polis. Kurke re-creates a "language of metals" by analyzing the stories and practices associated with coinage in texts ranging from Herodotus and archaic poetry to Aristotle and Attic inscriptions. She shows that a wide variety of imagery and terms fall into two opposing symbolic domains: the city, representing egalitarian order, and the elite symposium, a kind of anti-city. Exploring the tensions between these domains, Kurke excavates a neglected portion of the Greek cultural "imaginary" in all its specificity and strangeness.

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"The glorious, classical legacy of Greece is universally revered. But this legacy has come at a price. How will Greece ever move beyond its ties with the past? Is there such a thing as modern Greece? This book is the first to present an alternative cultural history of Greece. Beginning with the growth of Greece as a nation-state through to the present, it shows how modern Greece has long been undervalued and neglected. From the compositional process of the first National Poet to the first feminist text, the first sustained Marxist treatise of Greek society to the Athens subway system, this groundbreaking book brings together a fascinating mix of literary texts, maps and aspects of material culture to uncover the identity of modern Greece. In considering these rich cultural landmarks, Calotychos argues that a new relationship with the past must be forged if Greek literature, culture and society are to be truly part of the present and meet the challenges of modernity. Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics fills a major gap. Its refreshing approach provides an original insight into the everyday, lived experience of Greece. The intriguing range of case studies, the historical depth, and the engagement with cultural and literary theory will be of great value to literature students, cultural theorists, anthropologists, philologists and historians alike"--Bloomsbury Cultural History