A Univ. of Chicago classicist fears the alt-right will appropriate the classics for their own ends.
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Tag Archives: Iliad
Saving the Classics from Ideologues
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aeneid, classics, culture wars, Homer, Odyssey, Virgil Comments closed
The Dangers of Emotional Identification
In which I push back against an article warning about emotional identification with literary characters.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Age of Sensibility, Anne Radcliffe, Goethe, Hannah Arendt, Homer, Jane Austen, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Namwali Serpell, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Sorrows of Young Werther Comments closed
The World Will End in Fire AND Ice
When Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” it now appears (judging by Australia and Greenland) that everyone is right.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Fire and Ice", Australian wildfires, C. S. Lewis, climate change, Homer, Last Battle, Robert Frost Comments closed
To Avoid War, Look to The Iliad
As we once again hear war’s drum beat, it’s good to return to “The Iliad” and its vision of peace: the Achilles-Priam truce.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Donald Trump, Homer, Iran, Middle East, oil strike, Saudi Arabia, war Comments closed
Homer, Anti-War Poet
Tuesday One of my most satisfying reads in recent years is Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and The Trojan War. Alexander is the kind of writer that I aspire to be: an academic who taps into the meticulous research of other scholars to write for a popular […]
Amazon Fires and the Fury of Achilles
Monday Few news items have alarmed and depressed me as much as the burning of the Amazon rain forests, often called the “lungs of the world.” As National Geographic reports The Amazon rainforest—home to one in 10 species on Earth—is on fire. As of last week, 9,000 wildfires were raging simultaneously across the vast rainforest […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Amazon fires, climate change denial, global warming, Homer, Jair Bolsonaro Comments closed
Through Lit, We Learn Compassion
Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Prelude", Aeschylus, compassion, Eumenides, Euripides, Heracles, Homer, Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia, Sophocles, Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth Comments closed
Anger in Ancient Greek Works
A new book looks at how the ancient Greeks approached the issue of anger in works such as “Iliad,” “Ajax,” and “Hecuba.
Great Pro-War Literature Doesn’t Exist
In which I argue that great pro-war literature doesn’t exist, including “The iliad” and “War and Peace.” (Both works are magnificent; I just don’t see them as pro-war.)
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Charge of the Light Brigade", Alfred Lord Tennyson, anti-war literature, Catch 22, Donald Trump, Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homer, Joseph Heller, Leo Tolstoy, Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer, Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, war, War and Peace Comments closed