James I. Porter

Constructions of the Classical Body

James I. Porter
1999

University of Michigan Press

Classical scholarship has traditionally neglected the prominence of the body in antiquity. Constructions of the Classical Body theorizes that the study of antiquity is necessarily a study of the body, and that attention to this fact can lead to a much-needed shift in the way in which classical studies are approached today. This volume aims to reestablish the relevance of the problem of the body at the perimeters of several different kinds of inquiry, and, in this way, to help open up a field of possibilities for future study.
The...

The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy”

James I. Porter
2000
James I. Porter

Stanford University Press, 2000

This book argues that The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. These continuities are displayed above all in the entanglement of his surface narratives, in the self-consuming artifice of his writing, in the interplay of his voices, posturings, and ironies—in a word, in his staging of meaning rather than in his...

Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future

James I. Porter
2000

Stanford University Press, 2000

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology. It traces the contours of his earliest philological thinking and opens the way to a fresh view of his later thinking. The book's primary aim is to displace the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor in Nietzsche's reception, namely the assumption that Nietzsche passed from a precritical phase to an enlightened phase in which he liberated himself from...

Before Subjectivity? Lacan and the Classics, ed. James I. Porter and Mark Buchan, special double issue of Helios, vol. 31, no. 1-2 (2004)

James I. Porter
2004
Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, Tex., 2004
Introduction / James I. Porter and Mark Buchan Looking to the feet: The riddles of the Scylla / Mark Buchan From Antigone to Joan of Arc / Slavoj Zizek In Parmenidem Parvi Commentarii / Mladen Dolar Cato the elder and the destruction of Carthage / Ellen O'Gorman Vergil's Voids / James I. Porter Seeing and saying: A Psychoanalytic account of Ekphrasis / Jas Elsner The Vanishing point, or speculative mathemes in Neoplatonism / Sara Ahbel-Rappe Auto-Iconicity and its vicissitudes...

The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience

James I. Porter
2010
James I. Porter

Cambridge University Press, 2010

This is the first modern attempt to put aesthetics back on the map in classical studies. James Porter traces the origins of aesthetic thought and inquiry in their broadest manifestations as they evolved from before Homer down to the fourth-century and then into later antiquity, with an emphasis on Greece in its earlier phases. Greek aesthetics, he argues, originated in an attention to the senses and to matter as opposed to the formalism and...

The Sublime in Antiquity

James I. Porter
2016

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 its range of expressions to its dates of emergence, evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book...

Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome

James I. Porter
2005
James I. Porter

Princeton University Press, 2005

The term "classical" is used to describe everything from the poems of Homer to entire periods of Greek and Roman antiquity. But just how did the concept evolve? This collection of essays by leading classics scholars from the United States and Europe challenges the limits of the current understanding of the term. The book seeks not to arrive at a final definition, but rather to provide a cultural history of the concept by exploring how the...

Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach

James I. Porter
2013
James I. Porter - Erich Auerbach

Princeton University Press, 2013

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. Yet the true depth of Auerbach’s thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach’s essays, many of...

Postclassicisms

The Postclassicisms Collective
James I. Porter
2019

Made up of nine prominent scholars, The Postclassicisms Collective aims to map a space for theorizing and reflecting on the values attributed to antiquity. The product of these reflections, Postclassicisms takes up a set of questions about what it means to know and care about Greco-Roman antiquity in our turbulent world and offers suggestions for a discipline in transformation, as new communities are being built around the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Structured around three primary concepts—value, time, and responsibility—and nine...

The Cynics With and Without Foucault

James I. Porter
2023

In the last three years of his life, Michel Foucault made a sudden and unexpected turn to the ancient Cynics. In lectures from 1982 to 1984, and most notably in his final Collège de France lectures from 1984 (The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II), he sought to recover from the Cynics a potential for critique, militant revolution, and a courageous means of speaking truth to power. Foucault's engaged scholarship is inspiring, but in many respects, it is indistinguishable from conventional scholarly approaches to ancient Cynicism. In both cases,...