Ahuvia Kahane - Böcker

This is an exciting and original study on the poetic significance of formal repetition in Homer. The author argues that localization, metre, and verse-structure are regularly used as semantic markers, providing certain words with a "meaning" that extends beyond their immediate context. This meaning often interacts with context-specific semantic features, creating a discourse that is replete with ambiguity, ambivalence, irony, and allusion. The discussion draws on recent approaches in linguistics and literary criticism, including narratology, pragmatics, socio-linguistics, discourse analysis, and speech-act theory, but lays emphasis on the primary text as an object of study. The author shows how Homer's polysemic texture contributes to the presentation of key literary topics such as the image of the hero in the Iliad or disguise and recognition in the Odyssey.

Nowadays we can judge books by their covers. In antiquity, when a 'book' was a papyrus roll, its first few words advertised the nature of the text to follow. The Prologue of Apuleius' innovative novel, the Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass), is an extraordinary example of a programmatic opening, which has captivated readers and scholars from the Renaissance to the present day. This short text raises a variety of important questions about liberty, and about historical and linguistic interpretation. Along with a new text and translation of the Prologue, the twenty-four discussions in this volume, commissioned from internationally known specialists, cover issues ranging from philosophy and cultural history to intertextuality and Latinity. This collection of essays combines the broader perspectives of an interdisciplinary anthology with the closer focus of a traditional commentary. As a model for collaborative work, it displays the strength and diversity of existing approaches to ancient texts and is designed to stimulate new developments in the study of classics and later literatures.

In Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition author Ahuvia Kahane considers central aspects of Homer's poetry, such as truth, knowledge, gender, virtue and the heroic code, authorship, memory and song, diction and formula. This book makes the case for performative, rather than essential values in the Illiad and the Odyssey. On the one hand performativity allows Homeric epic form to enact diverse claims and agendas in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. On the other hand, the performative character of Homer's values implies radical resistance to fixity of reference, forms of meaning, and patterning, etc. No individual performers or group of historical interpreters can thus claim exclusive authority over the song and its contents i.e. over its truth, knowledge, social codes, its diction, authorship, etc. The interaction of diversity and radical resistance marks the traditional and canonical icon we call "Homeric epic." It is a shared record of many pasts open to all but exclusive to none. Performativity may be a general quality of all poetic discourse, or indeed of language itself. Nevertheless, this study suggests that in historical terms Homeric poetry has been, and perhaps still is, one of the most prominent sites for exercising tradition and claims of cultural continuity. Diachronic Dialogues is an essential addition to scholarship in literary criticism and the classics.

In Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition author Ahuvia Kahane considers central aspects of Homer's poetry, such as truth, knowledge, gender, virtue and the heroic code, authorship, memory and song, diction and formula. This book makes the case for performative, rather than essential values in the Illiad and the Odyssey. On the one hand performativity allows Homeric epic form to enact diverse claims and agendas in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. On the other hand, the performative character of Homer's values implies radical resistance to fixity of reference, forms of meaning, and patterning, etc. No individual performers or group of historical interpreters can thus claim exclusive authority over the song and its contents i.e. over its truth, knowledge, social codes, its diction, authorship, etc. The interaction of diversity and radical resistance marks the traditional and canonical icon we call "Homeric epic." It is a shared record of many pasts open to all but exclusive to none. Performativity may be a general quality of all poetic discourse, or indeed of language itself. Nevertheless, this study suggests that in historical terms Homeric poetry has been, and perhaps still is, one of the most prominent sites for exercising tradition and claims of cultural continuity. Diachronic Dialogues is an essential addition to scholarship in literary criticism and the classics.

This book brings together an international group of artists and writers to respond to the question of how our new world orders force us to reconsider urban walking and urban spaces in ways which extend into the digital sphere of online dialogue and screen sharing. In their reflections on walking cities in lockdown, the artists and writers contributing to this book share a number of complementary themes. Key to this is the question of how we walk in post-pandemic cities and how such walking might motivate or be motivated by transgressive, atomised or collective thoughts, affects, relations and experiences. Here we see how navigating cities in lockdown requires us to re-territorialise, improvise, create and de- or re-politize. There is, for example, a clear distinction between the severe lockdown measures that were introduced in Cape Town and the liberal appeal to good citizenship that northern hemisphere cities such as Stockholm chose to rely on. These measures impact on the way we experience urban walking and, in each case, lead to deeper reflections about the heightened presence of ideological structures embedded within the urban.

This book brings together an international group of artists and writers to respond to the question of how our new world orders force us to reconsider urban walking and urban spaces in ways which extend into the digital sphere of online dialogue and screen sharing. In their reflections on walking cities in lockdown, the artists and writers contributing to this book share a number of complementary themes. Key to this is the question of how we walk in post-pandemic cities and how such walking might motivate or be motivated by transgressive, atomised or collective thoughts, affects, relations and experiences. Here we see how navigating cities in lockdown requires us to re-territorialise, improvise, create and de- or re-politize. There is, for example, a clear distinction between the severe lockdown measures that were introduced in Cape Town and the liberal appeal to good citizenship that northern hemisphere cities such as Stockholm chose to rely on. These measures impact on the way we experience urban walking and, in each case, lead to deeper reflections about the heightened presence of ideological structures embedded within the urban.

This book rethinks the characterization of two highly contrastive forms of ancient literary tradition - epic and novel - and re-frames their function as dynamic points of reference in the history of ideas and in our understanding of the interface between antiquity and the modern. Epic and novel have often been construed in terms of sharp contrasts: temporally, with the epic anchored in the canonical beginnings of classical literature, as opposed to the novel, which rises only late in the ancient era; hierarchically, with epic regularly occupying the canonical core while the novel often resided in the periphery; and in terms of specific highly contrasting attributes: 'sublime' vs. 'subversive'; an aspiration to 'oral' song vs. an intimate association with book culture; heroic vs. 'anti-heroic' or 'mock-heroic'.Ahuvia Kahane argues for the fallibility of each of several major differential attributes, to the point of generic disintegration. He then constructs a new understanding of epic and novel in antiquity as part of a more fragile, dynamic framework, governed by intertextuality and openness on the one hand, and by fragmented interpretive traditions on the other.

Homer's poetry is widely recognized as the beginning of the literary tradition of the West and among its most influential canonical texts. Outlining a series of key themes, ideas, and values associated with Homer and Homeric poetry, Homer: A Guide for the Perplexed explores the question of the formation of the Iliad and the Odyssey - the so-called 'Homeric Problem'. Among the main Homeric themes which the book considers are origin and form, orality and composition, heroic values, social structure, and social bias, gender roles and gendered interpretation, ethnicity, representations of religion, mortality, and the divine, memory, poetry, and poetics, and canonicity and tradition, and the history of Homeric receptions. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of scholarship on Homer and early epic, Ahuvia Kahane explores contemporary critical and philosophical questions relating to Homer and the Homeric tradition, and examines his wider cultural impact, contexts and significance. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential poet, providing readers with some basic suggestions for further pursuing their interests in Homer.