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The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets (Tim. 28c3), who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both (28a6-b2). The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts of race are deeply implicated in concepts of national borders, and inherent in those concepts are fear, aggression, and violence. Such concepts are historical and in no way natural. This history has been traced by Foucault and others. Derrida's "infinite hospitality" offers an alternative way of conceptualizing identity. He argues for a radical openness to the other. Camus's "L'hôte" problematizes the concepts of hospitality, freedom, and identity in the French colonial context. These are not fated or decreed. Like Daru and his prisoner in Camus, we have a choice. That choice is never outside of a context. And that context may pervert our intentions. But we do not have to choose the prison of the given; we can envision a world of infinite, nomadic hospitality, and of openness to the other, even as we acknowledge that such openness may mean that we, as we understand ourselves, no longer exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of the passages leading up to the myth of the cave and contends that the Republic frames this famous passage less as the illustration of a transcendental truth than as a problematic and self-referential meditation on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of distinguishing between being and seeming. It contends that the myth when read in context not only asks us to distinguish between shadows on the wall and things themselves, it also forces us to interrogate this distinction. How does the world beyond appearance appear? What is it like? How does the truth seem? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Persius' claim to truth is inseparable from the stylistic complexity of his poetry. Irony becomes a method of truth-telling, not simply as a means of demystification but also as a way of pointing beyond the corruption of contemporary language. Part I of the article examines Persius' general discussion of poetic style throughout the corpus in light of Stoic conceptions of truth and the "sayable." Part II focuses on the opening of the Prologue and its relation to Satire 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the concepts of ethics and irony and the role of irony in any ethical work. A parallel illustration of ethics and irony is presented through the works and writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Major claims note that irony is the disruptive emergence of reality into a symbolic continuity through a gesture, that irony is the result of critical thinking and ethics and the possibility of saying something real or ethical is based on the possibility of not saying what one means.

Deals with classical poetry by Propertius. Post-Lacanian feminists' definition of a woman; Creation of a subject position identified simultaneously with Augustan and anti-Augustan positions; Deployment of the trope of gender inversion in elegiac discourse; Explanatory framework for examining formal rhetoric of elegy.

This paper argues that French poststructuralist theory does not represent a movement antithetical to Classics and the Classical Tradition, but should be read as its extension. Major recurring themes of poststructuralist thought are articulated at the beginning of the 1960's in Lacan's commentaries on Sophocles' Antigone and Plato's Symposium. Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus as well as his citation of the Platonic tradition in his dispute with Foucault over the latter's Histoire de la folie further confirm the importance of the Hellenic tradition to poststructuralism's engagement with occidental philosophy. Finally, Foucault's late turn to Stoicism and the philosophers of the Roman imperial period can be seen as a response to and criticism of the positions established by Lacan and Derrida. The Classics are not only relevant to understanding poststructuralist theory and philosophy, but actually define the terms of its debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines etymology and dialectics in Stephane Mallarme's poem `Sonnet en yx.' Mallarme's interest in the poetic possibilities of historical philology; Hegel's influence on Mallarme's thought on language and history; Mallarme's use of Latin and Greek etymologies of individual words; Use of the Greek word `ptyx.'

Examines the relationship between the images of fire and the labyrinth as used in Books 5 and 6 of Vergil's `Aeneid'. Intersection of a series of fire images with a series of labyrinth images; Embodiment of the Minotaur and the action of Trojan women of unlawful desires; Use of analytical categories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; Labyrinth as symbolic of repression.

Examines the beliefs of Perry Anderson, a founder of the `New Left Review' and one of the foremost historians and theoreticians to come out of the British Marxist Renaissance of the sixties and seventies. Major works; Argument against Francis Fukuyama's article `The End of History?'; Rejection of Leninist single-party politics; Capitalism.

This paper explores how scholarship on Roman elegiac poetry has changed by tracing interpretations of the elusive figure of the puella in Roman poetry. Charting the history of the concept of the puella in elegy, the paper detects broader trends and epistemic shifts in the field of Classics and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]