This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss Cicero's practice of submitting his texts to others for comment, arguing that the mutual reading and correction of friends' works played an important social function. By discussing what would make a text better, Cicero and his collaborators worked to forge and maintain social ties. In addition, I pursue an important corollary: for a text to provoke this activity, it must present itself as unfinished or in progress. Cicero was aware of this corollary, and in the (...) Brutus he used images of textual incompletion to critique Atticist and Caesarian theories of style as solitary, antisocial, and implicitly autocratic. This led him to formulate an important new literary politics, which he put into practice in the years after Pompey's defeat in the civil war. (shrink)

The Republic’s ban on poetry is a major reason for the prominent place that liberal critics assign to Plato among the enemies of the open society, Friedrich Nietzsche's description of Plato as “the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced” being often cited. In this article, I argue that, while Plato's ethical stance remains unacceptable for most readers today, his understanding of aesthetic experience in the Republic appears highly perceptive when seen in the light of cognitive studies and can (...) be thought‐provoking for current debates. As I try to show in the first half of the article, Plato's assessment of responses to poetry and theater resonate with embodied and enactive views of cognition. To corroborate this thesis, I point out in the second half that while theory has been blind to the significance of Plato's aesthetics, its major ideas are substantiated in practice. Contemporary psychotherapy and its increasing deployment of virtual reality unknowingly and with the opposite intent realize Plato's approach to the cognitive dynamics and ethical potential of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

El presente artículo es la segunda parte de un estudio sobre dos problemas de la prosodia del griego antiguo vinculados a la relación entre el acento tonal dellenguaje y la estructura silábica de las palabras. En él, luego de una introducción general y un resumen de la primera parte, se analiza el problema de las palabrascon acento barítono sobre sílabas cerradas. La principal novedad del análisis es que el corpus de estudio es la poesía homérica, fuente antes desatendida comoevidencia del (...) acento. (shrink)

This article vindicates a rereading of the concept of authority and tries to dissociate this concept from the concept of power in order to undo their identification and thereby the oblivion of the specific nature of authority. Besides, this rereading must not be confused with an apology of authority but with an exploration about this complicated and ambivalent category. The key point of this distinction lies in that authority, unlike power, depends not on itself but on the other person, the (...) person who acknowledges another one as authority. Therefore, authority can be compatible with freedom and can appear as an exteriority of power, which undermines it or even becomes a counterpower. Hence the logical endeavours of power to monopolize and instrumentalize authority. (shrink)

En Después del fin del arte, Danto se refiere a la mímesis como un estilo artístico y como la respuesta filosófica a la pregunta acerca de qué es el arte. En el panorama del arte contemporáneo, la mímesis se habría agotado y no tendría ningún papel activo que cumplir. El objetivo de mi trabajo será mostrar cómo Danto construye un relato legitimador en torno a la mímesis que le permite justificar su tesis sobre el fin del arte. Luego, señalaré los (...) problemas que implica dicho relato, haciendo hincapié en la pluralidad de sentidos que entraña la noción de mímesis desde sus primeras formulaciones griegas. Finalmente, expondré algunas razones que permiten seguir sosteniendo la vigencia de la noción de mímesis en la discusión contemporánea, sin invalidar la crítica que subyace a la controvertida tesis de Danto sobre el fin del arte. (shrink)