James I Porter

Biographic Data

ID311456
NAMEJames I Porter
GIVEN NAMESJames I
FAMILY NAMEPorter
SIGNATUREPORTER J I
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of California, Irvine
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS87
TOTAL CITATIONS82
AUTHOR COUNT84
EDITOR COUNT3
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1970
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX6

  • When Is Philology Made Jewish? The Example of Erich Auerbach, Part 1

    James I PorterARTICLECritical Inquiry2026References: 15

    The first part of an examination of Erich Auerbach’s philological method in connection with his Jewish background. The article takes issue with quite recent Christianizing approaches to Auerbach, including those that attempt to demonstrate how Catholic and Protestant theology influenced his writings, in particular that of Rudolf Bultmann, his contemporary at Marburg. Philology made Jewish names a style and approach to literary history that counte…

  • When Is Philology Made Jewish? The Example of Erich Auerbach, Part 2

    James I PorterARTICLECritical Inquiry2026References: 8

    Part 2 of this essay focuses on a recessed but palpable thread that runs through the entirety of Erich Auerbach’s philology, though most strikingly in his two most celebrated writings, “Figura” (1938) and Mimesis (1946). All his writings speak directly to his own historical circumstances. But they do so by underscoring the ineffaceable Jewish inheritances of Western literature and culture. In the process, his writings also do something else: they…

  • Filologias do presente para o futuro

    Open AccessJames I PorterARTICLEHeródoto - Revista do Grupo de…2025

    Este artigo explora a natureza multifacetada da filologia, traçando suas raízes na história ocidental desde a Grécia clássica até seu florescimento na Alexandria helenística e a subsequente integração na Europa durante o Renascimento e depois. Ao contrário da narrativa predominante da "philologia perennis", esse relato desafia o entendimento convencional da filologia ao destacar suas diversas dimensões além da análise textual. O argumento lida co…

  • Love, Strife, and the Roots of All Things

    Open AccessJames I PorterARTICLERepresentations2025

    Current ecological thinking has made the early fifth-century Greek philosopher Empedocles of Acragas into a household name, thanks to the four-element theory that he bequeathed to posterity.1 A return to the elements and to Empedocles is perhaps unsurprising in a world that is experiencing ever greater climatological distress and a heightened proximity to earth, water, air, and fire, the fourfold constituents of Empedocles’s cosmology, and the ve…

  • (Dis)enchanted Elementalities

    James I Porter, Mario TeloARTICLERepresentations2025

    “Elemental” thinking is one way of approaching the relationship between human beings and their ecological surroundings. It is increasingly the only way to experience, if not fully comprehend, this relationship. Having passed through the enlightened disenchantment of nature, whereby nature was brought into a scientific regime of knowledge, with science representing humankind’s intellectual and technical mastery of its perimeters, we are currently …

  • Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity

    James I PorterARTICLERepresentations2024

    Michel Foucault's return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault's Introduction to Kant's "Anthropology" (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant's theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault's "What Is Enlightenment?" (1984)…

  • Self and World in extremis in Roman Stoicism

    James I PorterCHAPTEROxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy2023

    Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school’s teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self’s intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the byproduct of a complex set of experiences in the face of na…

  • Time, History, and Literature

    Erich Auerbach, James I Porter et al.BOOKTime, History, and Literature2021

  • P.Mich. inv. 2754

    James I PorterARTICLEClassical Philology2021

    The essay is partly papyrological (with new firsthand readings and corrections of earlier editions of the fragment) and partly interpretive, connecting the papyrus to other parts of Alcidamas’ preserved work, with special attention to what the new readings bring out: (a) structural features of the Certamen that point to its internal coherence and are suggestive of Alcidamas’ involvement in the whole of that text; (b) new light on Homer’s literacy…

  • Homer

    James I PorterBOOKHomer2021Cited by: 2

    The story of our ongoing fascination with Homer, the man and the myth. Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived, and whether he was an actual person, a myth, or merely a shared idea. Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of this character, James I. Porter explores the sources of H…

  • Hermeneutic Lines and Circles

    James I PorterCHAPTERHomer's Ancient Readers2019

  • CHAPTER Four. Hermeneutic Lines and Circles

    James I PorterCHAPTERHomer's Ancient Readers2019

  • Nietzsche’s Untimely Antiquity

    Open AccessJames I PorterCHAPTERNew Cambridge Companion to…2019

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  • Against Λεπτοτης

    James I PorterCHAPTERCreating a Hellenistic World2018

  • Homer in the Gutter

    James I PorterBOOKMarginality, Canonicity, Passion2018

    In antiquity Homer may have been the most revered of poets, and the foundation of all literary criticism and philology; but he was also the most maligned and interfered with of ancient poets. He spawned entire traditions of literary critique, parody, subversion, and revision that kept his image alive down through the centuries and well into modernity. Homer lived on, in other words, both in the gutter and at the top tier of the literary and cultu…

  • Time for Foucault? Reflections on the Roman Self from Seneca to Augustine

    Open AccessJames I PorterARTICLEFoucault Studies2017

    The essay approaches the idea of the self as this was most often formulated in antiquity from Heraclitus to Augustine—not as the object of self-fashioning and self-care, but as an irresolvable problem that was a productive if disconcerting source of inquiry. The self is less cultivated than it is “unbounded,” less wedded to regimes of truth and discovery than it is exposed, precariously, to crises of identity and coherence in the face of a consta…

  • Disfigurations

    James I PorterARTICLECritical Inquiry2017Cited by: 10References: 12

  • The Sublime in Antiquity

    Open AccessJames I PorterBOOKSublime in Antiquity2016

    Current understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word ('sublimity') and by a single author ('Longinus'). The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from i…

  • The Sublime without Longinus

    James I PorterARTICLEboundary 22016Cited by: 1

    The contemporary understanding of Longinus and the sublime, which has been dominant for centuries (since Boileau), is crucially flawed. It is Longino-centric, it is riddled with assumptions about rhetoric, philosophy, and nature, and it forcibly enrolls the sublime in a well-worn tale about the aesthetic origins of modernity, which must itself transcend antiquity in order to be fully modern. On a fresh look at the problem, Longinus can be shown t…

  • The Sublime

    James I PorterOTHERA Companion to Ancient Aesthetics2015

  • Child, Francis James

    James Porter, James I PorterCHAPTERThe new Grove dictionary of music…2013

  • Homer, Skepticism, and the History of Philology

    Open AccessJames I PorterCHAPTERModernity's Classics2013

  • Learning from Pater

    James I PorterARTICLEClassical Receptions Journal2013References: 1

  • Poseidippos

    Open AccessJames I PorterCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2012

    Active in the first half of the third century BCE , Poseidippos was an epigrammatist famous and honored in his own lifetime ( see Epigram).

  • Aesthetics

    Open AccessJames I PorterCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2012

    The task of establishing the reach of aesthetic thought, experience, and reflection in ancient Greece and Rome immediately runs up against two formidable challenges.