Page Dubois
Biographic Data
| ID | 3681803 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Page Dubois |
| GIVEN NAMES | Page |
| FAMILY NAME | Dubois |
| SIGNATURE | DUBOIS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Democratic Swarms
How to Tell a Slave
After pointing out the significant differences between ancient slavery and modern racialized slavery, this chapter considers the manifold difficulties entailed in distinguishing between enslaved and free persons in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It stresses the social, economic, and legal importance of maintaining these distinctions even as it acknowledges their elusive nature. It goes on to describe the ways in which behaviours, bodies—ofte…
Torture and Truth (Routledge Revivals)
Sappho
Sappho
Offering nuanced readings of Sappho s poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters. Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even – by the Victorians – chaste head…
A Million and One Gods
As A Million and One Gods shows, polytheism is considered a scandalous presence in societies oriented to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Yet it persists, even in the West, perhaps because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies
Sappho, Tithonos and the ruin of the body
The ruins of classical antiquity provoke a paradoxical, antinomic response; they evoke fears of decay and death, even as they promise survival and even immortality. The paper illustrates this point by discussing a newly discovered fragment of Sappho. The author suggests that the poem's meanings, held in abeyance, echo the ways in which we encounter the ruins of antiquity as twenty-first-century readers, identifying with these bodies, desiring bot…
Slavery
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's momentous words are closely related to the French concept of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite'; and both ideas incarnate a notion of freedom as inalienable human right that in the modern world we expect to take for granted. In the ancient world, by contrast, the concepts of freedom and equality had litt…
Slavery
This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways…
The Democratic Insect
How does the insect swarm serve as a figure for humanity? In recent formulations by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the swarm buzzes for the anonymous multitude, achieving creative solutions to humankind's problems "through collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model." Such a vision constructs a benign and beneficent swarm that, although it lacks differentiation and spec…
Reading the Writing on the Wall
The History of the Impossible
Oedipus as Detective
Toppling the Hero
Toppling the Hero" considers contemporary uses of the term "tragic," as well as the philosophical tradition concerning tragedy. Page duBois argues that the earliest theorist of tragedy, Aristotle, wrote belatedly, from a post-classical perspective on the democratic city and its political/religious rituals, and began a long tradition of misreading fifth-century tragedy, focusing on management of the individual through tragic catharsis in a new kin…
Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis
The chorus of Euripides' Medea, first performed in the fifth century BCE in Athens, responds to the central character Medea's plans to poison her rival with a famous example of the rhetorical topos of adynaton, "the impossible." Women, notorious for deceit, have always been victims of ill-fame, but now it is men, like Jason, the barbarian Medea's Greek husband, whose pledges cannot be trusted. The chorus exults
An Especially Peculiar Undertaking
page dubois is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Sappho Is Burning (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Torture and Truth(Routledge, 1991), Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (University of Chicago Press, 1988), andCentaurs and Amazons: Woman and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (University of Michigan Press, 1982
Eros and the Woman
Well then, gentlemen, the earthly Aphrodite's Love is a very earthly Love indeed, and does his work entirely at random. It is he that governs the passions of the vulgar. For, first, they are as much attracted by women as by boys; next, whoever they may love, their desires are of the body rather than of the soul; and, finally, they make a point of courting the shallowest people they can find, looking forward to the mere act of fruition and careles…
Torture and Truth
Centaurs and Amazons
Torture and Truth
The ancient Greeks routinely tortured slaves to extract evidence for legal trials. They considered truth obtained from slaves by torture to be more reliable than the freely-given testimony of free men. This text questions whether recollection of this fact is merely a curiosity that allows us to marvel at our progress from the past, or whether our very idea of truth, the truth of the philosophical tradition founded by the ancient Greeks, is caught…
Sowing the Body
Sowing the Body
Inscription, the law and the comic body
Inscription, the Law, and the Comic Body (pp. 69-84) L'auteur pose d'abord en termes généraux le problème de la réception, aux États-Unis, des nouvelles approches proposées par les chercheurs français, particulièrement de l'anthropologie du monde grec ancien, déve- loppée autour de Jean-Pierre Vernant. Pour dépasser les limites de cette réception, freinée essentiellement par le «new criticism», il convient d'ouvrir la lecture des œuvres à des que…
History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic
Centaurs and Amazons
Traces the development of the Greek hierarchical view of life that continues to permeate Western society
The History of the Impossible
Sappho
Offering nuanced readings of Sappho s poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters. Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even – by the Victorians – chaste head…
Slavery
This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways…
Toppling the Hero
Toppling the Hero" considers contemporary uses of the term "tragic," as well as the philosophical tradition concerning tragedy. Page duBois argues that the earliest theorist of tragedy, Aristotle, wrote belatedly, from a post-classical perspective on the democratic city and its political/religious rituals, and began a long tradition of misreading fifth-century tragedy, focusing on management of the individual through tragic catharsis in a new kin…
Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis
The chorus of Euripides' Medea, first performed in the fifth century BCE in Athens, responds to the central character Medea's plans to poison her rival with a famous example of the rhetorical topos of adynaton, "the impossible." Women, notorious for deceit, have always been victims of ill-fame, but now it is men, like Jason, the barbarian Medea's Greek husband, whose pledges cannot be trusted. The chorus exults
Sappho, Tithonos and the ruin of the body
The ruins of classical antiquity provoke a paradoxical, antinomic response; they evoke fears of decay and death, even as they promise survival and even immortality. The paper illustrates this point by discussing a newly discovered fragment of Sappho. The author suggests that the poem's meanings, held in abeyance, echo the ways in which we encounter the ruins of antiquity as twenty-first-century readers, identifying with these bodies, desiring bot…
Reading the Writing on the Wall
An Especially Peculiar Undertaking
page dubois is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Sappho Is Burning (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Torture and Truth(Routledge, 1991), Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (University of Chicago Press, 1988), andCentaurs and Amazons: Woman and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (University of Michigan Press, 1982
Eros and the Woman
Well then, gentlemen, the earthly Aphrodite's Love is a very earthly Love indeed, and does his work entirely at random. It is he that governs the passions of the vulgar. For, first, they are as much attracted by women as by boys; next, whoever they may love, their desires are of the body rather than of the soul; and, finally, they make a point of courting the shallowest people they can find, looking forward to the mere act of fruition and careles…
Ambiguity and Reversal
N HIS 1939 STUDY of ambiguity in Greek literature, W. B. Stanford notes that from the point of view of amphibology, Oedipus Rex occupies a special position as a model.1 No literary genre in antiquity, in fact, uses so abundantly as tragedy expressions of double meaning, and Oedipus Rex includes more than twice as many ambiguous forms as the other plays of Sophocles (fifty, according to the table that Hug drew up in 1872).2 The problem, however, i…
Ambiguity and Reversal
N HIS 1939 STUDY of ambiguity in Greek literature, W. B. Stanford notes that from the point of view of amphibology, Oedipus Rex occupies a special position as a model.1 No literary genre in antiquity, in fact, uses so abundantly as tragedy expressions of double meaning, and Oedipus Rex includes more than twice as many ambiguous forms as the other plays of Sophocles (fifty, according to the table that Hug drew up in 1872).2 The problem, however, i…
Centaurs and Amazons
Traces the development of the Greek hierarchical view of life that continues to permeate Western society
History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic
Inscription, the law and the comic body
Inscription, the Law, and the Comic Body (pp. 69-84) L'auteur pose d'abord en termes généraux le problème de la réception, aux États-Unis, des nouvelles approches proposées par les chercheurs français, particulièrement de l'anthropologie du monde grec ancien, déve- loppée autour de Jean-Pierre Vernant. Pour dépasser les limites de cette réception, freinée essentiellement par le «new criticism», il convient d'ouvrir la lecture des œuvres à des que…
Sowing the Body
Sowing the Body
Centaurs and Amazons
Torture and Truth
The ancient Greeks routinely tortured slaves to extract evidence for legal trials. They considered truth obtained from slaves by torture to be more reliable than the freely-given testimony of free men. This text questions whether recollection of this fact is merely a curiosity that allows us to marvel at our progress from the past, or whether our very idea of truth, the truth of the philosophical tradition founded by the ancient Greeks, is caught…
Eros and the Woman
Well then, gentlemen, the earthly Aphrodite's Love is a very earthly Love indeed, and does his work entirely at random. It is he that governs the passions of the vulgar. For, first, they are as much attracted by women as by boys; next, whoever they may love, their desires are of the body rather than of the soul; and, finally, they make a point of courting the shallowest people they can find, looking forward to the mere act of fruition and careles…
Torture and Truth
An Especially Peculiar Undertaking
page dubois is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Sappho Is Burning (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Torture and Truth(Routledge, 1991), Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (University of Chicago Press, 1988), andCentaurs and Amazons: Woman and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (University of Michigan Press, 1982
Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis
The chorus of Euripides' Medea, first performed in the fifth century BCE in Athens, responds to the central character Medea's plans to poison her rival with a famous example of the rhetorical topos of adynaton, "the impossible." Women, notorious for deceit, have always been victims of ill-fame, but now it is men, like Jason, the barbarian Medea's Greek husband, whose pledges cannot be trusted. The chorus exults
Toppling the Hero
Toppling the Hero" considers contemporary uses of the term "tragic," as well as the philosophical tradition concerning tragedy. Page duBois argues that the earliest theorist of tragedy, Aristotle, wrote belatedly, from a post-classical perspective on the democratic city and its political/religious rituals, and began a long tradition of misreading fifth-century tragedy, focusing on management of the individual through tragic catharsis in a new kin…
Oedipus as Detective
The History of the Impossible
Reading the Writing on the Wall
Slavery
This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways…
The Democratic Insect
How does the insect swarm serve as a figure for humanity? In recent formulations by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the swarm buzzes for the anonymous multitude, achieving creative solutions to humankind's problems "through collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model." Such a vision constructs a benign and beneficent swarm that, although it lacks differentiation and spec…
Slavery
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's momentous words are closely related to the French concept of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite'; and both ideas incarnate a notion of freedom as inalienable human right that in the modern world we expect to take for granted. In the ancient world, by contrast, the concepts of freedom and equality had litt…
Sappho, Tithonos and the ruin of the body
The ruins of classical antiquity provoke a paradoxical, antinomic response; they evoke fears of decay and death, even as they promise survival and even immortality. The paper illustrates this point by discussing a newly discovered fragment of Sappho. The author suggests that the poem's meanings, held in abeyance, echo the ways in which we encounter the ruins of antiquity as twenty-first-century readers, identifying with these bodies, desiring bot…
A Million and One Gods
As A Million and One Gods shows, polytheism is considered a scandalous presence in societies oriented to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Yet it persists, even in the West, perhaps because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies
Sappho
Sappho
Offering nuanced readings of Sappho s poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters. Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even – by the Victorians – chaste head…
Torture and Truth (Routledge Revivals)
How to Tell a Slave
After pointing out the significant differences between ancient slavery and modern racialized slavery, this chapter considers the manifold difficulties entailed in distinguishing between enslaved and free persons in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It stresses the social, economic, and legal importance of maintaining these distinctions even as it acknowledges their elusive nature. It goes on to describe the ways in which behaviours, bodies—ofte…
Art (17 works) · History (15 works) · Literature (13 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Art history (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)