Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory (...) as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art. At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies. (shrink)

Poetic translation of Tibullus Elegy I.3.

Propertian elegy is not an obstinately male genre. It is engendered as masculine in its discursive mastery over the female object of its erotics and poetics, but engenders itself as effeminate in its association with softness, submissiveness, and impotence, and as feminine especially in its self-critique and its interrogation of Roman gender and sexuality.M. Wyke,The Roman Mistress, 189.

The essay reflects in an elegiac mode on a now largely forgotten (or effaced) body of literature from precolonial India regarding the art and business of politics. This body, known as nīti, has classical roots in Sanskrit but came in particular to be popular in peninsular India between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries in vernacular languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Secular and this-worldly in orientation, it can be broadly contrasted to the far better known body of texts (...) on dharma, which are concerned to preserve a normative, ritually and religiously sanctioned, order based on strict adherence to caste and gender roles. We first trace the classical roots of the tension between dharma and nīti and then set out how these two bodies of texts came to play distinct and evolving roles in medieval and early modern south India. We argue further that under the early phase of colonial rule, East India Company officials misunderstood the nature of nīti texts and that this has led to a persistently erroneous view of their role and content. We conclude by noting, however, that some astute modern observers of and participants in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nīti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India. (shrink)

This article revisits the question of how elegy was performed at the symposion, and argues that, rather thanbeing either musical or non-musical, elegy situates itself between speech and song. None of the passages in whichelegy mentions song are clearly self-referential: they tend to be generic, set in the future, concerned with otherperformers and other compositions or altogether too slippery in their language to pin them down. Moreover, there area number of elegiac pieces that appear designed to allow symposiasts (...) to shift from song to speech or speech to song,thereby introducing a new mode of performance, and so are themselves transitional. These observations about the wayelegiac texts position their own performance are complemented by considerations about their actual performance.Evidence both from ancient musicologists and from other tonal languages suggests that inbetween modes of deliverywere common in Greek poetry and the metrical shape makes elegy a prime candidate. The final section of the articleturns to the difficult term elegos in fifth-century drama. It argues that several of these passages draw on inbetweennessas one association of elegos and thus decreases the gap between elegos and surviving elegy. A coda points out that theelegiacs in Euripides' Andromache are a further example of elegy transitioning between two modes of performance. (shrink)

This paper is chiefly concerned with the circumstances in which early Greek elegy was performed. Section II argues that for our extant shorter poems only performance at symposia is securely attested. Section III examines the related questions of the meaning ofelegosand the performance of elegies at funerals. Finally I try to establish the existence of longer elegiac poems intended for performance at public festivals.

Russell's new theory of denoting phrases introduced in "On Denoting" in Mind 1905 is now a paradigm of analytic philosophy. The main argument for Russell's new theory is the so-called 'Gray's Elegy' argument, which purports to show that the theory of denoting concepts promoted by Russell in the 1903 Principles of Mathematics is incoherent. The 'Gray's Elegy' argument rests on the premise that if a denoting concept occurs in a proposition, then the proposition is not about the concept. (...) I argue that the premise is false. The 'Gray's Elegy' argument does not exhaust Russell's ammunition against the theory of denoting concepts. Another reason Russell rejects the theory is, as he says, that it cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts. In the last section of the paper, I argue that even though Russell was right in thinking that the theory of denoting concepts cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts, Russell's new theory does not succeed in eliminating the occurrence of all denoting concepts, as it requires a commitment to the existence of variables that indirectly denote their values. However, the view that variables are denoting concepts is unproblematic once the 'Gray's Elegy' argument is blocked. (shrink)

(2006). Gray’s Elegy for Progress. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, The Political Theory of John Gray, pp. 227-241.

The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's. Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, (...) Lacan, and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time. Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum. (shrink)

In his recent book, "The Metaphysicians of Meaning" (2000), Gideon Makin argues that in the so-called "Gray's Elegy" argument (the GEA) in "On Denoting", Russell provides decisive arguments against not only his own theory of denoting concepts but also Frege's theory of sense. I argue that by failing to recognize fundamental differences between the two theories, Makin fails to recognize that the GEA has less force against Frege's theory than against Russell's own earlier theory. While I agree with many (...) aspects of Makin's interpretation of the GEA, I differ with him regarding some significant details and present an interpretation according to which the GEA emerges as simpler, stronger, and more integrated. (shrink)

Roman elegy is well known for its reversal of traditional Roman gender roles: women are presented in positions of power, chiefly but not exclusively erotic, that bear little or no relation to women's lived experience in the first centuryb.c.e. Yet the way elegy presents the beloved in a position of power over her lover, as Sharon James has observed, ‘retains standard Roman social and power structures, thus suggesting an inescapable inequity even within a private love affair: rather than (...) sharing goals and desires, lover and beloved are placed in a gendered opposition … Hence resistant reading by thedominais an anticipated and integral part of the genre’. James's remark is indeed correct for each of the instances in which thedomina, or female beloved, speaks directly. When she does so, as James also shows, she speaks at cross-purposes with her lover, following a script that is designed ‘to destabilize him’ in an attempt to keep his interest. Yet what has not been noticed is that when the beloved is instead male, the situation is quite different. Tibullus' Marathus in poem 1.8, our sole example of a male elegiac beloved-turned-speaker, is the exception that proves the fundamental rule of gender inequity. Marathus, that is, when given the opportunity to speak, does in fact share the aims of a male lover, albeit in pursuit of his ownpuella. When the gendered opposition so integral to elegy is erased, the beloved no longer protests against the strictures of the genre; when both are male, lover and beloved alike are entitled to speak as elegiac lovers. (shrink)

Minimalists, such as Paul Horwich, claim that the notions of truth, reference and satisfaction are exhausted by some very simple schemes. Unfortunately, there are subtle difficulties with treating these as schemes, in the ordinary sense. So instead, minimalists regard them as illustrating one-place functions, into which we can input propositions (when considering truth) or propositional constituents (when considering reference and satisfaction). However, Bertrand Russell's Gray's Elegy argument teaches us some important lessons about propositions and propositional constituents. When applied to (...) minimalism, these lessons show us why we should abandon it. (shrink)

This paper examines three medical student poems about death to explore how medical students use poetry to understand their encounters with dying patients and to discuss how these poems function as elegies in the context of medical culture.