Archive for Yurie HongPage 5
We are Rome! Or are we?
Speaking of conversations in print… In his column Third Party Rising, Thomas Friedman compares destructive factors in modern American politics with the conditions that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. He envisions a third party presidential candidate proclaiming to the American people… “I am not going to tell you what you want to […]
An Evening with Derek Walcott
On Sept. 27th, classics majors and members of the Classics and English departments spent an evening conversing with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Mr. Walcott is best known for his poem Omeros, a Caribbean epic loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. He regaled his audience with tales of living by the sea and his days learning Latin […]
Socrates, Plato, and “Can you twitter your way to a good life?”
A flurry of recent articles and responses made me think about my Plato class with regard to the advantages and disadvantages of different modes of communication and the relationship of each to civic engagement. In his New Yorker article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, Malcolm Gladwell makes the argument that despite forecasts that […]
Coming soon to a desktop near you: Greek texts!
Breaking news! In an interesting addendum to the Mary Beard post a little while back… The British Library said Monday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and […]
Pictures. Worth a 1,000 Words? More like 400 euros.
In ‘How Much Does a Picture of the Parthenon Cost?‘, Mary Beard reflects on the prohibitively expensive fees charged by the Acropolis Museum to reproduce pictures of its interior for publication in an academic book. …I had a nice picture of the frieze as displayed in Athens, taken by the husband, which I wanted to […]
Classics and Modern Art
HT Sean Cobb An interesting review of three art exhibitions in the New York Times: Movements Expanded and Refined. Classics figures into the article tangentially, but here are the highlights: -information on the exhibit Chaos and Classicism, which… “…traces [the] interwar classical aesthetic as it worked its way from a poetic, mythic idea in the […]
What Would Plato Say?
Renowned Plato scholar Alexander Nehemas, writing for the New York Times philosophy blog ‘the Stone,’ wonders what Plato would have to say about the current debate over the impact of tv, movies, and video games on society. Plato’s Pop Culture Problem, and Ours. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a case that […]
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
It’s starting to look like it might. Here’s the latest update from the New York Times. Not directly classics-related but super interesting, and it still has a bearing on how we should think about the ways in which language and thought subtly influence one another. Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English […]
Odyssean Drama on the Greek Archaeological Front
Archaeologists have discovered a palace on Ithaka, which some are calling the Palace of Odysseus. Here’s the briefing from the ‘Athens News Agency‘: Greek archaeologists believe they have found the remains of a royal residence of pre-Classical Ithaca , with links to legendary Odysseus (Ulysses) inevitably coming to mind. Excavations by a University of Ioannina […]
From Homer to Beyonce, with love
HT: Emma and Paula From Questionablecontent.net Classical allusions, Homer and Beyonce, what’s not to love? Actually, this connection has been getting some attention for a while now. Take a look at this course: Singer of Tales: The Epic in Action from Homer to Hip-Hop… This course is about the epic poem in ancient and modern […]