Duncan F. Kennedy – författare

This book presents an innovative theoretical framework for exploring the intellectual culture of ancient Greece in the period 450–350 BC. The bewildering questions and surprising opportunities posed by emergent styles of ontological thinking at this time, about issues of being and becoming, of presence (what is or is not there for us), and about different modes of existence, moulded the divergent responses of figures such as Herodotus and Thucydides, Parmenides, Protagoras, and Democritus, as well as cultural practices such as tragedy, and the fiercely abstract thinking of the early Greek geometers and mathematicians. Many new ways of seeing were being created, and, with them, new objects and modes of inquiry. Taking its cue from the historical 'ontological turn' in the humanities, as seen in the work of, amongst others, Tristan Garcia, Ian Hacking, and Bruno Latour, it challenges existing narratives of the development of Greek thought that continue to reflect the metaphysical agenda created by Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BC, responses those earlier thinkers could not have foreseen, and which can frequently be shown to be highly tendentious. Their texts are instead located in contemporary fields of sense that draw attention to details that suggest different lines of development, the traces of which can be detected even in receptions that are hostile. Dynamically linking ancient and modern thought, the book is accessible to a broad readership interested in how disciplines now taken for granted (including history, philosophy, anthropology, and mathematics) first emerged as distinct styles of inquiry.

This book examines the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. Each study is centred around a reading of a poem or poems together with a discussion of a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches. All Latin texts and terms are translated or closely paraphrased. Although the book concentrates on the work of the Roman elegists, the challenging insights it offers into the processes involved in the reading and appropriation of the texts of the past are relevant to scholars and students of classical literature in general, and its discussion of such key issues as history, textuality, representation, discourse, gender, ideology and metaphor will be of concern to those interested in literary theory and cultural studies.

Society and contemporary culture seem forever fascinated by the topic of time. In modern fiction, Ian McEwan (The Child in Time) and Martin Amis (Time's Arrow) have led the way in exploring the human condition in relation to past, present and future. In cinema, several cultural texts (Memento, Minority Report, The Hours) have similarly reflected a preoccupation with temporality and human experience. And in the sphere of politics, debates about the 'end of history', prompted by Francis Fukuyama, indicate that how we live is deeply determined by our relationship not only to place but also to the passing of time. But what did the ancients think about time? Is our interest in chronology a relatively recent phenomenon? Or does it go further back? In his major new work, Duncan Kennedy indicates that our own fascination with time-reckoning is by no means unique.Discussing a number of key texts (such as Homer's Odyssey; Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; Virgil's Aeneid; and Ovid's Metamophoses) and imaginatively setting these side-by-side with modern works (such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Joyce's Ulysses), he shows that, from era to era, and in different ways, human beings have uniformly striven to understand the unfolding of history and their relationship to it.

Society and contemporary culture seem forever fascinated by the topic of time. In modern fiction, Ian McEwan (The Child in Time) and Martin Amis (Time's Arrow) have led the way in exploring the human condition in relation to past, present and future. In cinema, several cultural texts (Memento, Minority Report, The Hours) have similarly reflected a preoccupation with temporality and human experience. And in the sphere of politics, debates about the 'end of history', prompted by Francis Fukuyama, indicate that how we live is deeply determined by our relationship not only to place but also to the passing of time. But what did the ancients think about time? Is our interest in chronology a relatively recent phenomenon? Or does it go further back? In his major new work, Duncan Kennedy indicates that our own fascination with time-reckoning is by no means unique.Discussing a number of key texts (such as Homer's Odyssey; Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; Virgil's Aeneid; and Ovid's Metamophoses) and imaginatively setting these side-by-side with modern works (such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Joyce's Ulysses), he shows that, from era to era, and in different ways, human beings have uniformly striven to understand the unfolding of history and their relationship to it. This sophisticated cross-disciplinary book will appeal not only to classicists, but also to scholars and students in the humanities more broadly, as well as beyond.