Duncan F Kennedy
Biographic Data
| ID | 5626296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Duncan F Kennedy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Duncan F |
| FAMILY NAME | Kennedy |
| SIGNATURE | KENNEDY D F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Time
This chapter explores the ways in which Lucretius and Augustine engage with Greek philosophies of time in distinctive ways that continue to resonate through subsequent philosophical thinking about human mortality, the question of the creation of the world, the relationship of the human and the divine, change and permanence, the relationship between discourse about the world and the world it seeks to describe, and not least time itself. Time poses…
Absence, Metaphysically Speaking: From Reception to Instauration?
This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles , it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what…
Virgilian Epic
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Voices in Conflict
Voices in Conflict Duncan F. Kennedy I first came across the Harvard School as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1970s. While studying the Aeneid, I'd come across in the college bookshop a copy of Steele Commager's Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) in Prentice Hall's Twentieth Century Views series. I was beginning to develop an interest in mapping literary critical approaches, and Commager's book on Horace's Ode…
What’s in a Name? Delia in Tibullus 1.1
Delia, the name given to Tibullus’ mistress in five of the poems in the first book of his elegies (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, 1.6), has long inspired curiosity. Two approaches have dominated discussion. The biographical approach takes its cue from the Apology of Apuleius (10), which regards Delia as a pseudonym: eadem igitur opera accusent C. Catullum, quod Lesbiam pro Clodia nominarit, et Ticidam similiter, quod quae Metella erat Perillam scripserit, e…
Lucretius
The De rerum natura (usually translated as On the Nature of Things or On the Nature of the Universe) is a Latin poem in six books composed in the mid-1st century bce by Titus Lucretius Carus to introduce a Roman audience to the philosophy of the Greek materialist thinker Epicurus (341–270 bce). The loss of much of Epicurus’s own output means that Lucretius has become the most important source for Epicurean philosophy, but the creative transformat…
Crossing the threshold: Genette, Catullus and the psychodynamics of paratextuality
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers
What is a paratext, and where can we find it in a Roman text? What kind of space does a paratext occupy, and how does this space relate to the text and its contexts? How do we interpret Roman texts 'paratextually'? And what does this approach suggest about a work's original modes of plotting meaning, or the assumptions that underpin our own interpretation? These questions are central to the conceptual and practical concerns of the volume, which o…
The Political Epistemology of Infinity
This chapter reads the big picture of Lucretius' pursuit of Epicurean truth against the model of late Republican political ideology, with its imperialist narrative of conquest. The Lucretian claim for absolute truth is placed in the context of the traffic between cosmological knowledge and socio‐political authority, figured as a journey, such that Epicurus becomes a type for Julius Caesar, reporting back to the centre from the periphery of the Ro…
In the Step(pe)s of GeniusPushkin’s Ovidian Exile
The youthful Pushkin’s poem ‘To Ovid’ (1821) takes up the Ovidian tradition of self-conscious reflection on exile. This chapter considers the poem’s literary and historical context and rhetorical strategies. Tomis, the place of Ovid’s exile, was ceded by the Ottoman Empire to Russia in 1812, shortly before Pushkin was exiled there; Pushkin approached this unknown and exotic area with the models of Byron and Ovid. Pushkin’s poem indicates how his …
Epistolarity: The Heroides
In Book 3 of his Ars amatoria , Ovid rounds off a survey of authors put forward as suitable reading for the would-be female lover with a characteristic claim that his works will bring him immortality. Perhaps, he surmises, his name will be ranked with those of Sappho, Propertius or Virgil; perhaps 'somebody will say: “read the cultured poems of our maestro, in which he draws up the battle-lines of the sexes”' - the Ars amatoria itself -' “or the …
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature
"Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature provides a lucid and concise introduction to contemporary debates about representation and the status of scientific claims, epistemological issues central to the so-called Science Wars. The book offers a stimulating reading of Lucretius's poem on physics, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Naturum), which Duncan Kennedy uses as a case study in the historicization of scientific theory.…
The Cambridge Companion to Ovid
Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential information is combined with exciting critical approaches. This…
Bluff Your Way in Didactic: Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris
1 Malcolm Heath (1985.254) bases his plea on a formal technicality: "Lucretius adopts the posture of one expounding and advocating the Epicurean philosophy, and that is precisely what he intends to achieve: philosophical persuasion. Ovid, equally, adopts in the Ars Amatoria the posture of one expounding and inculcating the principles of the art of seduction; but no one supposes that Ovid really wrote his poem in order to instruct the youth of Rom…
Virgilian epic
In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting 'word' or 'utterance'), the poet of the Eclogues, through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, 'kings and battles', Eel. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, a…
Modern receptions and their interpretative implications
To offer a survey of modern receptions of Virgil in this chapter would be to follow, with unequal footsteps and all too close behind, Theodore Ziolkowski's magisterial account in his Virgil and the Moderns, which appeared as recently as 1993. Ziolkowski suggests that Virgil's presence in the twentieth century is particularly apparent as a cultural icon and avatar appropriated by poets, novelists, historians and politicians to configure their aspi…
The Cambridge Companion to Virgil
Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectiv…
The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy
This book examines the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. Each study is centred around a reading of a poem or poems together with a discussion of a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches. All Latin texts and terms are translated or closely paraphr…
The epistolary mode and the first of Ovid's Heroides
In April 1741 there appeared a slim volume entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews by a certain Mr Conny Keyber, whose name is generally supposed to conceal that of the novelist Henry Fielding. Shamela , to give the book its more familiar title, was a parody of Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded , which had been published to great acclaim the previous year. In a series of letters purportedly sent to ea…
Gallus and The Culex
The Culex remains the most bewildering of poems. The consensus of modern opinion holds that it is a deliberate forgery, post-Ovidian in date, purporting to be a work of the youthful Virgil and thus serving to fill the large biographical vacuum in the career of the poet before the publication of the Eclogues . If this is the case, it must be asked why the forger chose to fill that gap with a poem thematically and stylistically so idiosyncratic whi…
Gallus and The Culex
The Culex remains the most bewildering of poems. The consensus of modern opinion holds that it is a deliberate forgery, post-Ovidian in date, purporting to be a work of the youthful Virgil and thus serving to fill the large biographical vacuum in the career of the poet before the publication of the Eclogues . If this is the case, it must be asked why the forger chose to fill that gap with a poem thematically and stylistically so idiosyncratic whi…
The epistolary mode and the first of Ovid's Heroides
In April 1741 there appeared a slim volume entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews by a certain Mr Conny Keyber, whose name is generally supposed to conceal that of the novelist Henry Fielding. Shamela , to give the book its more familiar title, was a parody of Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded , which had been published to great acclaim the previous year. In a series of letters purportedly sent to ea…
Bluff Your Way in Didactic: Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris
1 Malcolm Heath (1985.254) bases his plea on a formal technicality: "Lucretius adopts the posture of one expounding and advocating the Epicurean philosophy, and that is precisely what he intends to achieve: philosophical persuasion. Ovid, equally, adopts in the Ars Amatoria the posture of one expounding and inculcating the principles of the art of seduction; but no one supposes that Ovid really wrote his poem in order to instruct the youth of Rom…
Gallus and The Culex
The Culex remains the most bewildering of poems. The consensus of modern opinion holds that it is a deliberate forgery, post-Ovidian in date, purporting to be a work of the youthful Virgil and thus serving to fill the large biographical vacuum in the career of the poet before the publication of the Eclogues . If this is the case, it must be asked why the forger chose to fill that gap with a poem thematically and stylistically so idiosyncratic whi…
The epistolary mode and the first of Ovid's Heroides
In April 1741 there appeared a slim volume entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews by a certain Mr Conny Keyber, whose name is generally supposed to conceal that of the novelist Henry Fielding. Shamela , to give the book its more familiar title, was a parody of Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded , which had been published to great acclaim the previous year. In a series of letters purportedly sent to ea…
The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy
This book examines the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. Each study is centred around a reading of a poem or poems together with a discussion of a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches. All Latin texts and terms are translated or closely paraphr…
Virgilian epic
In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting 'word' or 'utterance'), the poet of the Eclogues, through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, 'kings and battles', Eel. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, a…
Modern receptions and their interpretative implications
To offer a survey of modern receptions of Virgil in this chapter would be to follow, with unequal footsteps and all too close behind, Theodore Ziolkowski's magisterial account in his Virgil and the Moderns, which appeared as recently as 1993. Ziolkowski suggests that Virgil's presence in the twentieth century is particularly apparent as a cultural icon and avatar appropriated by poets, novelists, historians and politicians to configure their aspi…
The Cambridge Companion to Virgil
Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectiv…
Bluff Your Way in Didactic: Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris
1 Malcolm Heath (1985.254) bases his plea on a formal technicality: "Lucretius adopts the posture of one expounding and advocating the Epicurean philosophy, and that is precisely what he intends to achieve: philosophical persuasion. Ovid, equally, adopts in the Ars Amatoria the posture of one expounding and inculcating the principles of the art of seduction; but no one supposes that Ovid really wrote his poem in order to instruct the youth of Rom…
Epistolarity: The Heroides
In Book 3 of his Ars amatoria , Ovid rounds off a survey of authors put forward as suitable reading for the would-be female lover with a characteristic claim that his works will bring him immortality. Perhaps, he surmises, his name will be ranked with those of Sappho, Propertius or Virgil; perhaps 'somebody will say: “read the cultured poems of our maestro, in which he draws up the battle-lines of the sexes”' - the Ars amatoria itself -' “or the …
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature
"Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature provides a lucid and concise introduction to contemporary debates about representation and the status of scientific claims, epistemological issues central to the so-called Science Wars. The book offers a stimulating reading of Lucretius's poem on physics, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Naturum), which Duncan Kennedy uses as a case study in the historicization of scientific theory.…
The Cambridge Companion to Ovid
Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential information is combined with exciting critical approaches. This…
In the Step(pe)s of GeniusPushkin’s Ovidian Exile
The youthful Pushkin’s poem ‘To Ovid’ (1821) takes up the Ovidian tradition of self-conscious reflection on exile. This chapter considers the poem’s literary and historical context and rhetorical strategies. Tomis, the place of Ovid’s exile, was ceded by the Ottoman Empire to Russia in 1812, shortly before Pushkin was exiled there; Pushkin approached this unknown and exotic area with the models of Byron and Ovid. Pushkin’s poem indicates how his …
The Political Epistemology of Infinity
This chapter reads the big picture of Lucretius' pursuit of Epicurean truth against the model of late Republican political ideology, with its imperialist narrative of conquest. The Lucretian claim for absolute truth is placed in the context of the traffic between cosmological knowledge and socio‐political authority, figured as a journey, such that Epicurus becomes a type for Julius Caesar, reporting back to the centre from the periphery of the Ro…
Crossing the threshold: Genette, Catullus and the psychodynamics of paratextuality
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers
What is a paratext, and where can we find it in a Roman text? What kind of space does a paratext occupy, and how does this space relate to the text and its contexts? How do we interpret Roman texts 'paratextually'? And what does this approach suggest about a work's original modes of plotting meaning, or the assumptions that underpin our own interpretation? These questions are central to the conceptual and practical concerns of the volume, which o…
Lucretius
The De rerum natura (usually translated as On the Nature of Things or On the Nature of the Universe) is a Latin poem in six books composed in the mid-1st century bce by Titus Lucretius Carus to introduce a Roman audience to the philosophy of the Greek materialist thinker Epicurus (341–270 bce). The loss of much of Epicurus’s own output means that Lucretius has become the most important source for Epicurean philosophy, but the creative transformat…
Voices in Conflict
Voices in Conflict Duncan F. Kennedy I first came across the Harvard School as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1970s. While studying the Aeneid, I'd come across in the college bookshop a copy of Steele Commager's Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) in Prentice Hall's Twentieth Century Views series. I was beginning to develop an interest in mapping literary critical approaches, and Commager's book on Horace's Ode…
What’s in a Name? Delia in Tibullus 1.1
Delia, the name given to Tibullus’ mistress in five of the poems in the first book of his elegies (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, 1.6), has long inspired curiosity. Two approaches have dominated discussion. The biographical approach takes its cue from the Apology of Apuleius (10), which regards Delia as a pseudonym: eadem igitur opera accusent C. Catullum, quod Lesbiam pro Clodia nominarit, et Ticidam similiter, quod quae Metella erat Perillam scripserit, e…
Virgilian Epic
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Absence, Metaphysically Speaking: From Reception to Instauration?
This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles , it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what…
Time
This chapter explores the ways in which Lucretius and Augustine engage with Greek philosophies of time in distinctive ways that continue to resonate through subsequent philosophical thinking about human mortality, the question of the creation of the world, the relationship of the human and the divine, change and permanence, the relationship between discourse about the world and the world it seeks to describe, and not least time itself. Time poses…
Art (15 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (13 works) · Literature (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · History (11 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Poetry (7 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · History and criticism (5 works)