The Muse S Offering

Why is the memoir genre so important? What is it that drives us to tell our own stories? The ancient Greek myth of Goddess Memory, and her daughters, the Muses, offers new ways to re-enter the stories of our lives and shape them in surprising ways. Mnemosyne's birthing of the Muses underscores her commitment to express all of the facets of her personal story: grief, joy, love, body, breath, history, spirituality, reverie, and humor. The memoirist follows Mnemosyne's imaginal lineage in crafting all memoirs. Memories live in matter, in the very cells of our bodies. Writing our life stories allows us to consider the content of our experiences, the plurality of perspectives from which we can choose to shape them, and the use that we want to make of them. We may choose to write for many reasons, psychological, physical, and cultural healing being just a few. This book suggests the exploration of an imaginable field is possible when we look at how figures from Greek mythology continue to inspire contemporary life writing.

Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vitalforms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists -- or victims -- in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fatesand explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Hellenistic poets opted and were very likely expected to deal meaningfully, and perhaps competitively, with the tradition they inherited. They also needed to secure the goodwill of actual or potential patrons. Apollonius, the author of a novel heroic epic, eschews references to literary polemics and patronage. Callimachus often adopts a polemical stance against some colleagues in order to suggest his poetic excellence. Theocritus chooses a third way, which has not been investigated adequately. He avoids antagonism but ironizes the theme of poetic excellence and distances himself from the tradition of competitive success. He does not cast his narrators as superior to predecessors and contemporaries but stresses the advantages and merits of colleagues. This rejection of conceit is connected with a major strand in Theocritean poetry: the power of word, including song, to provide assistance to characters in distress is a major open issue. Language is versatile and potent but not all-powerful. Song gives pleasure but is not a panacea while instruction and advice are never helpful and may even prove harmful. Most genuine pieces are ambiguous and open-ended so that the aspirations of characters are not presented as doomed to failure.

In the tradition of Wild and Eat, Pray, Love comes an epic, inspiring new story about one woman’s triumph of spirit as she follows winter across five continents Steph Jagger had seen the ski-lift sign thousands of times—Raise Restraining Device, it read—but one day she took it personally as a rallying cry to shake off the life she had for the life she wanted. She had always been a force of nature, so why was she still holding herself back? Dissatisfied with the passive, limited roles she had seen for women when she was growing up, Steph emulated the men in her life—chasing success, climbing the corporate ladder, ticking the boxes, playing by the rules. She was accomplished. She was living The Dream. But it wasn’t her dream. The sign became her mantra. Steph walked away from the success and security she had worked long and hard to obtain. She quit her job, took a second mortgage on her house, sold everything except her ski equipment and her laptop and bought a plane ticket. For the next year, she followed winter across five continents on a mission to break the world record for most vertical feet skied in a year—four million. What hiking was for Cheryl Strayed, skiing became for Steph: a crucible in which to crack open her life and melt it down to its very elements. Electrifying, heartfelt and full of humour, Unbound is Steph’s story—an odyssey of courage and self-discovery that, like Wild and Eat, Pray, Love, will inspire readers to remove their own restraining devices and pursue the life they are meant to lead.

What was the role of mousike in Greek life? Broader in its implications than the English "music," mousike, the realm of the Muses, lay at the heart of Greek culture. Yet, despite its centrality, its social and intellectual implications have rarely been investigated. In these new and specially commissioned essays leading experts analyze the political, religious, and ethical significance of musical performance in the classical Athenian city, and open up a new field of investigation in cultural history.

Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority, reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this volume, an influential group of international scholars examines these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The result is a series of striking and original readings from different critical perspectives that display the centrality of these questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar texts.