Introduction: Play, Power, and the Western Mentality Whereas play has always had an important, if sometimes unthemat- ized, role in Western literary ...

The old humanistic model, aiming at universalism, ecumenism, and the globalization of various Western systems of values and beliefs, is no longer adequate - even if it pleads for an ever-wider inclusion of other cultural perspectives and for intercultural dialogue. In contrast, it would be wise to retain a number of its assumptions and practices - which it incidentally shares with humanistic models outside the Western world. We must now reconsider and remap it in terms of a larger, global reference (...) frame. This anthology does just that, thus contributing to a new field of study and practice that could be called intercultural humanism. (shrink)

Tracing the interrelationship among play, poetic imitation, and power to the Hellenic world, Mihai I. Spariosu provides a revisionist model of cultural change in Greek antiquity. Challenging the traditional and static distinction made between archaic and later Greek culture, Spariosu's perspective is grounded in a dialectical understanding of values whose dominance depends on cultural emphasis and which shifts through time. Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus--the "God of many names," (...) of both poetic play and sacred power--as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides' Bacchae, Aristophanes' The Frogs, Plato's Republic and Laws, and Aristotle's Poetics and Politics. Spariosu's model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics. (shrink)