Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture

2018-04-12 Foreign Language Study

Author : Joseph A. Howley
Release : 2018-04-12
Genre : Foreign Language Study
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 123/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture by : Joseph A. Howley

Download or read book Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture written by Joseph A. Howley. This book was released on 2018-04-12. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture. He argues that Gellius is in close conversation with predecessors both Greek and Latin, such as Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, and also offers new ways of making sense of the text's 'miscellaneous' qualities, like its disorder and its table of contents. Dealing with topics ranging from the framing of literary quotations to the treatment of contemporary celebrities who appear in its pages, this book offers a new way to learn from the Noctes about the world of Roman reading and thought.

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire

2010-06-03 History

Author : William A. Johnson
Release : 2010-06-03
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 05X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire by : William A. Johnson

Download or read book Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire written by William A. Johnson. This book was released on 2010-06-03. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.

Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire

2024 Foreign Language Study

Author : Assistant Professor of Classics and Senior Research Associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology Scott J Digiulio
Release : 2024
Genre : Foreign Language Study
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 268/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire by : Assistant Professor of Classics and Senior Research Associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology Scott J Digiulio

Download or read book Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire written by Assistant Professor of Classics and Senior Research Associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology Scott J Digiulio. This book was released on 2024. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Aulus Gellius and his sole surviving work, the Noctes Atticae (NA), have long stood on the periphery of Classical scholarship. This second century CE compilation, conventionally termed a miscellany, collects vast amounts of otherwise lost ancient literature, and the depictions of scholarly activity throughout the work have led some to see in Gellius a kindred spirit-a Classicist avant la lettre. Yet, the NA is a fascinating work of literature in its own right, depicting the intellectual and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire and offering invaluable evidence for the evolution of Latin prose as a literary form in the Antonine period. In contrast to previous scholarship that looks past the randomness of the NA, this book argues that the conceit of disorder enabled Gellius to probe the nature of reading in the second century CE. Gellius' central preoccupation is articulating a distinct set of "ways of reading" that may be employed to navigate the web of literature in the Roman Empire. In turn, each of these ways of reading-through material framing devices, focal characters, recurrent citations in dialogue with one another, and allusive references to other near-contemporary works-can be used to examine Gellius' collection and appreciate its literary qualities. Incorporating inter- and intratextual analysis alongside narratology-informed approaches, this book investigates the strategies used by Gellius to innovate within the Latin literary tradition and provides a framework for interpreting his varietas on its own terms"--

Nox Philologiae

2009-01-15 Literary Criticism

Author : Erik Gunderson
Release : 2009-01-15
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 734/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Nox Philologiae by : Erik Gunderson

Download or read book Nox Philologiae written by Erik Gunderson. This book was released on 2009-01-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this strikingly original and playful work, Erik Gunderson examines questions of reading the past—an enterprise extending from antiquity to the present day. This esoteric and original study focuses on the equally singular work of Aulus Gellius—a Roman author and grammarian (ca. 120-180 A.D.), possibly of African origin. Gellius’s only work, the twenty-volume Noctes Atticae,is an exploding, sometimes seemingly random text-cum-diary in which Gellius jotted down everything of interest he heard in conversation or read in contemporary books. Comprising notes on Roman and classical grammar, geometry, philosophy, and history, it is a one-work overview of Latin scholarship, thought, and intellectual culture, a combination condensed library and cabinet of curiosities. Gunderson tackles Gellius with exuberance, placing him in the larger culture of antiquarian literature. Purposely echoing Gellius’s own swooping word-play and digressions, he explores the techniques by which knowledge was produced and consumed in Gellius’s day, as well as in our own time. The resulting book is as much pure creative fun as it is a major work of scholarship informed by the theories of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.

Aulus Gellius

2003-11-06 Literary Criticism

Author : Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Release : 2003-11-06
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 685/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Aulus Gellius by : Leofranc Holford-Strevens

Download or read book Aulus Gellius written by Leofranc Holford-Strevens. This book was released on 2003-11-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aulus Gellius originated the modern use of 'classical' and 'humanities'. His Attic Nights, so named because they began as the intellectual pastime of winter evenings spent in a villa outside Athens, are a mine of information on many aspects of antiquity and a repository of much early Latin literature which would otherwise be lost; he took a particular interest in questions of grammar and literary style. The whole work is interspersed with interesting personal observations and vignettes of second-century life that throw light on the Antonine world. In this, the most comprehensive study of Gellius in any language, Dr Holford-Strevens examines his life, his circle of acquaintances, his style, his reading, his scholarly interests, and his literary parentage, paying due attention to the text, sense, and content of individual passages, and to the use made of him by later writers in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and more recent times. It covers many subject areas such as language, literature, history, law, rhetoric, medicine; light is shed on a wide range of problems in Greek as well as Latin authors, either in the main text or in the succinct but wide-ranging footnotes. In this revised edition every statement has been reconsidered and account taken of recent work by the author and by others; an appendix has been added on the relation between the literary trends of Latin (the so-called archaizing movement) and Greek (Atticism) in the second century AD, and more space has been given to Gellius' attitudes towards women, as well as to recurrent themes such as punishment and embassies. The opportunity has been taken to correct or excise errors, but otherwise nothing has been removed unless superseded by more recent publications.

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