/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18902611]

The study of Classics is in a serious crisis. This much is obvious.

What do you think should be done to help it get out of the rut it is stuck in? Is Classics just too much of a dinosaur in contemporary education to have any chance at having the importance and rigor it had in, say, pre-WW1 times?

[Anonymous No.18902629]

>>18902611
Teach it to your children yourself.

[Anonymous No.18902651]

>>18902611
its just a phase of society. i dont know how many notable academics such as Jacques Barzun (cultural historian) have plausibly posited that we are in a rather textbook period of cultural decadence

[Anonymous No.18902670]

>>18902611
>not a philology student

[Anonymous No.18902678]

>>18902670
What do classical philologists do nowadays, anyway?

[Anonymous No.18902685]

>>18902629
This. All you can do is to make your closest surroundings into a pocket of civilization and hope it will merge with similar pockets over time.

[Anonymous No.18902709]

>>18902611
Learn yourself and teach your friends, family, and children. Encourage others to do the same. Don't expect the public school system and corporate academia to fix a problem they intentionally created. Don't be lazy.

[Anonymous No.18902721]

>>18902709
Based. It's so off-putting when people whine about the decline of the western civilization, yet they themselves haven't read a book in years.

[Anonymous No.18902782]

>>18902709
>>18902629
I did not mean helping in the peer-to-peer sense. I meant Classics as an institution, like, isn't Classics what anglos call the study of Greco-roman antiquity? Just looking out for oneself and others can work for a while, but there should be a corrective effort to combat the insanity that goes on in modern Classics departments. Those that are still staffed, that is.

[Anonymous No.18902840]

>>18902611
It is a real shame that nowadays there has been a significant shift away from classics and history as the "smart, academic subjects" in favour of the sciences and maths. I think we are already suffering the results of this, people dont seem to realize how the pendulum of morality, culture and broader society will always swing back and forth. Marrying the age leaves you deserted in the next.

[Anonymous No.18902852]

>>18902678
a lot of stuff. I don't know what but they do something, and there's a lot of them. I'm just saying OP probably isn't a student and you need to be a student to really know the field. There's a lot of stuff being done, still, a lot of translating and interesting work, but you can't do Homer for the millionth time, which is what no serious philologist would work on. Students are the most elitist and contrarian people around and they'd only use their prefered 19th century translation by x guy because it's most accurate and reads best, and so on--and those people work with the originals anyways, ofc.

[Anonymous No.18902858]

>>18902840
>sciences and maths
Hasn't it only shifted to engineering? I don't know anyone doing pure mathematics.

[Anonymous No.18902863]

>>18902782
You're projecting and trapped in your little anglo-american world. Not all americans are like that, and not all brits. You're talking about le annoying sjws and shiet who ruin everything, who don't get that far in serious academia. If you have a shitty department you'll have shitty people working there, but sleep tight knowing that real academics hate them too, and that in Europe, from Vienna to Heidelberg to Berlin there is still real philology being done.

[Anonymous No.18902875]

>>18902858
same thing

[Anonymous No.18902876]

>>18902840
>>18902858
People still think fields like phil are damn smart. Your average person on the street would probably think a phil student is smarter than a maths student in the ways that matter, and would be more impressed by someone studying the former because of its modern singularity and authenticity, because so few people study it and because of the way those who study it are pretty well made people to talk with and to answer questions to problems, in general.

[Anonymous No.18902896]

>>18902876
I think we come from different places. Someone studying philosophy in my country would get laughed at for being a pseud twitter user, and someone studying maths would be respected, and I don't think either of our two hypothetical characters would be worth talking to.

[Anonymous No.18902927]

>>18902611
Verbal intelligence has been replaced with feminine willingness to suffer. Marketing, HR, and all humanities academics are stuffed to the gills with women instead of verbally intelligent men. They do and then because they don't negotiate the whole field goes to shit. Look up salaries in advertising or journalism.

[Anonymous No.18902966]

>>18902629
That is the only way this days, but know that it may be inevitable that no matter what you do, the children will have a rebelious period and throw it all away, with luck that will just be a period and the get backt after it. Nonetheless, is the only way to keep most of old western culture alive nowadays, the school system was completely subverted, forming your own pockets with friends and family is the way forward to survive.
>>18902685
I introduced some lazy friends to the classics and tried to form a book club around it with family members and friends, going well so far, good to improve your relations with them though as a side effect.

[Anonymous No.18902972]

>>18902966
>I introduced some lazy friends to the classics and tried to form a book club around it with family members and friends, going well so far, good to improve your relations with them though as a side effect.

How do you not come off as a weirdo? I can't think of approaching any of my friends or family and unironically going "so, you wanna read the Aeneid for fun one of these days?"

[Anonymous No.18902994]

>>18902972
My family is mostly composed of smart people who already enjoy reading so it was just a matter of changing the books. As for friends, they are also smart people so I just kept talking and talking about the books and western culture untill I got them curious.

[Anonymous No.18903004]

>>18902840
It's because classics, history, philosophy and the arts have been exhausted. Creativity can now only be found in the sciences and engineering

[Anonymous No.18903021]

>>18903004
obviously wrong, poor bait.

[Anonymous No.18903033]

>>18903004
Go to bed, Hank. You're drunk.

[Anonymous No.18903043]

Humanities professors are in an impossible situation and do not believe in themselves or what they do. Like it or not, they are essentially involved with interpreting and transmitting old books preserving what we call tradition, in a democratic order where tradition is not privileged. They are partisans of leisure and the beautiful in a place where evident utility is the only passport. Their realm is the always and the contemplative, in a setting that demands the here and now and the active. The justice in which they believe is egalitarian and they are the agents of the rare, the refined and the superior. What could Shakespeare tell us about the racist and colonist 'realities' of modern life? it is hard to figure out since he appears to be implicit in those very 'realities'.

[Anonymous No.18903047]

>>18903004
>Creativity can now only be found in the sciences and engineering
That staled for a few decades now

[Anonymous No.18903056]

>>18903021
nah its true. Philosophy is just a dead end at this point. There are no great philosophers anymore. It's just interpreting old philosophers, or destroying it but not replacing it with anything new.
And art is fucking dead.

[Anonymous No.18903076]

>>18902611
You are all fighting a lost battle, is the time for them to go, they are not relevant anymore, the societies they represent no longer or is in a process of ceasing to exist. The sooner they dissapear the better for everyone so we can move forward into a better future with more equality.

[Anonymous No.18903100]

>>18902972
I think a good first step is to be as transparent about your interests in literature as other people are about their interests in popculture shit. Depending on your circle even this can be stigmatizing, but realize that hiding who you are in order to fit in is gay and is robbing you of dignity. So if you're doing this (I was), stop. That's for starters.

[Anonymous No.18903124]

>>18903056
philosophy isnt a dead end because questions remain unanswered or disputed. I believe philosophy will never be a dead end because by nature we will never solve the most important philosophical questions. The fact there aren't any great philosophers nowadays isn't a reflective of the subject of philosophy, its a reflective of our current culture. Not to mention philosophers are usually only given their dues long after theyre dead. Give it 100 years and you'll see that humanity springs back towards a society of culture as it always has done after a period of decadence and "art being dead." provided the earth is still habitable at that point.

[Anonymous No.18903127]

>>18903100
It may be hard for some people, to do so may end up isolating them

[Anonymous No.18903128]

>>18902896
Well I'm from Europe and whenever I tell someone I study phil. they're impressed by that. If they've read some books themselves they sure want to ask and talk about plato or hegel or whoever. But I guess I also read a lot of literature and have quite a lot of historical and cultural knowledge and some linguistics and philology in there, know some art. I guess that's not typical for a phil student to be that 'widely' knowledgable. Although I would wish it was.
So, I agree with you. You can't reduce anyone to being just a phil student while you making the example of a 'good' phil student rather *the* definitive example of just any phil student.

I also didn't mean to insult math at all. I generally think maths and phil are a fields which are pretty unique in a lot of ways and fields which interact in interesting and benefical ways.
But people here still think maths is smart but just academia smart and not someone you could talk to as a normal person and expect to get 'deeper' knowledge on things because a maths student is a scientist to them, like a biologist or physicist, who knows much about their field and just as much - in general - about the world as any other student, or person with a degree, while a philosophy student is just generally someone who knows a lot of stuff about a lot of different things, which people think is cool.

[Anonymous No.18903165]

>>18903056
>>18903124
I think Derrida said that nowadays students and people holding degrees become the heirs of geisteswissenschaften and other humanities. It's true that most things have been thought before and that systems like Hegels are just hard to dispute when the study of them takes decades and significant personal investment.
We also don't have the institutional and cultural environemnt to allow for philosophical study, and classical study, and art further to flourish, contrary to what you'd think with the ease of material distribution of these fields' products, in paper or digital form, with so many more people around who've read them as well.
It's something fundamental about how young people interact with these fields and how people are funded, who is funded, and how all this interacts with the given institutions, again, and the culture around philosophical and artistic endeavors, around literary discussion in general; linguistic shift, death of the author, the material artist etcetera.

[Anonymous No.18903192]

>>18902611
The works of the Greeks were lost to us for almost a millennium before they were revived. Have confidence that those who come after will do the same.

[Anonymous No.18903206]

>>18902611
I wonder if like a century on we'll have books written about all the crazy shit that this era has shat out of itself, like OP's pic related, just like people write about the Gobineaus and Chamberlains of yesteryear nowadays.

[Anonymous No.18903212]

>>18903192
>The works of the Greeks were lost to us for almost a millennium

[Anonymous No.18903218]

>>18903192
The question is what will survive, and this time we have way more control and information for those who would want to erase the past to do so.

[Anonymous No.18903236]

>>18903212
What is the meaning of this post?
>>18903218
You are right, in a sense, but consider also that there are copies of these books in public, private, and university libraries all over the world, including in Africa. You must also consider that no one is calling for the burning of books in this country. They are simply going to leave them on the shelves of university libraries and not bother teaching or reading them. Things will be fine.

[Anonymous No.18903258]

>>18903236
>You are right, in a sense, but consider also that there are copies of these books in public, private, and university libraries all over the world, including in Africa.
That would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that we constantly see this bash against "too white, too male, decolonize x or y", come from uni students and teachers alike on western universities and I don't even need to mention south africa, out all this list maybe private collections survive only if the owner cares something for history with no censorship.
>You must also consider that no one is calling for the burning of books in this country.
There are people calling for killing and burning, they are a minority, for now.

[Anonymous No.18903267]

>>18903004
That's not even how Spengler's world thesis works anon.

[Anonymous No.18903275]

>>18903267
He blatantly says so in the preface to Decline

[Anonymous No.18903282]

>>18902611

I have a degree in Classics.

The field is mostly doomed. Even among people who make a business of studying ancient languages, few can read with anything approaching competence. I've had professors who couldn't sight-read their way out of a paper bag.

There are a few factors here:
1.) Ancient languages take lots of time. You can't study for a few hours a week, it needs to be almost all you study for several years. Few colleges and no high schools are willing to let their students devote that much time to Latin and Greek.

2.) Use of technology spoils our attention span. Even intelligent people have trouble concentrating well enough to read and comprehend English, let alone dead languages. Someone of mediocre abilities 200 years ago was in some ways far smarter than the smartest people around today. They seem to have had better memories, anyway. And you can't learn Latin and Greek without a strong memory.

3.) Learning Classics means spending a lot of time simply absorbing information. The modern educational system emphasizes production of papers, "projects", etc. It's hard to master the Organon or commit thousands of principal parts to memory if you're weighed down with assignments, many of which will have nothing to do with Classics.

These factors are far more important than politics/cultural shifts though these are relevant, too. Plato and Aristotle repudiate physical pleasures and wealth and all of the things that most people care about. It's not all that pleasant to read about Socrates and God when your ambition is to drown yourself in distractions and bullshit.

There will always be a few people who devote their lives to these studies but I think they will be fewer and fewer.

The only good news is that, since Classics aren't valued at all by ὁἱ πολλοί, everything you could need is available for free on google books and project gutenberg etc

[Anonymous No.18903287]

>>18903258
>That would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that we constantly see this bash against "too white, too male, decolonize x or y", come from uni students and teachers alike on western universities and I don't even need to mention south africa, out all this list maybe private collections survive only if the owner cares something for history with no censorship.
I don't encounter any of this, because I don't read the mainstream press or watch the news. Do the same, and your life will improve.
>There are people calling for killing and burning, they are a minority, for now.
Ignore them. If you're genuinely worried, get hardcover copies of whatever books you want in translation and in the original languages, buy a home or set up an organization somewhere relatively free, like Africa (you will need to pay for security) or the poorer Southeast Asia (you might need security, but a lot less), and house them there. You could also set up servers in the same building. You could even go to religious organizations, e.g. Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, and ask them to store and copy some of these books for you. They may or may not agree to do so, but it would be better than sitting around complaining on the internet.
In any case, my point is that there are ways to get around these things. If you are genuinely concerned, start contacting people and make plans. No one is going to stop you if you act now.

[Anonymous No.18903288]

>>18903127
Yes, it may and it probably will, at least to some degree. I'm not saying it's easy but from my experience I'm better off after terminating a few acquaintances with brainlets around which I was mainly pretending anyway. To be clear: I'm not advocating for being an intrusive asshole, just for being honest about what you do. For example, when asked what are your plans for today you don't make up some shit in order to not appear boring to some midwit. When asked what you think of something, you use your knowledge to its full extent to formulate your answer instead of coming up with some default opinion not to make others insecure. And if your "friends" can't tolerate it they will be doing you a favor by alienating you.

[Anonymous No.18903296]

>>18903282
Do you happen to have any interesting stories, or advice for us? Thanks for posting.

[Anonymous No.18903319]

>>18903282
where did you get your degree? rather, where did your professors get their degrees?
i’m also in classics, but our faculty can read extremely well. they have faculty who got doctorates from berkeley, chicago, michigan, ut austin, urbana-champagne
only “weak link” is uc santa barbara, and he is still quite talented
all of them can sight read most anything you ask them to

also i generally disagree that classics is doomed. they resisted theory for a long time, which stagnated the field. now that theory is coming in, it seems to be growing a bit more. also, the oxyrinchous papyri are still myriad, there will be a need for papyrologists for decades

[Anonymous No.18903350]

>>18903319
What is philology work like? In your experience, I mean.

[Anonymous No.18903365]

>>18902840
Meh, science and math are important if you want to have a good job in today's society.
The problem is that very few people want to study anything else than the bare minimum required for their chosen occupation, even if it's just introduction/basics.
I see this constantly as a repeating pattern: Why do I need history if I'm going to be an engineer? Why do I need literature if I'm going to be a surgeon? &c.
You're never going to get it into their thick skulls that a broad general understanding is important, because they have a single mind of making it big and only focus on their job, to the exclusion of every other aspect of life.

[Anonymous No.18903372]

>>18903350
philology is pretty fucking boring to me
on the one hand, you can have something kinda cool with it, unlock something within a text (eg vir and homo in the first lines of aeneid)
but i have a tough time believing that there’s that much to say; that philosophical work doesn’t have a massive impact to me
i’m one of the dirty theorists in classics; i’ve done post colonial, deconstruction with early christian texts, and my masters thesis is with also theory based
for me, philology all work is ultimately a tool to use to show how theory can apply (or not) to a text. ultimately, i need to do good philology or else no classicist will read my research
when i did a post colonial reading, i had to do philological research on “barbaroi,” and show just how separating language worked in the text to other non-greeks

[Anonymous No.18903379]

>>18903372
*philological not philosophical, phoneposting sorry

[Anonymous No.18903387]

>>18903379
>Philology so irrelevant that phones dont even recognize it
sad!

[Anonymous No.18903390]

>>18903372
>i’ve done post colonial, deconstruction with early christian texts, and my masters thesis is with also theory based
What was the result of this endeavor?

[Anonymous No.18903463]

>>18903287
>I don't read the mainstream press or watch the news.
That's your decision and is indeed good for your mental health, but don't say that there isn't a movement on that direction existing right now.

[Anonymous No.18903476]

>>18903288
I agree with you, just saying that some people are not that strong and loneliness get them on some shitty company just to avoid the suffering of standing their ground alone.

[Anonymous No.18903516]

>>18902611
Honestly speaking, Padilla is right. Classics departments should disband and their subjects should become part of history, literature and philosophy departments. It makes no fucking sense whatsoever for a student to study history, philosophy, literature and language of a single segment of localized world history if not during a MA/PhD - or for LARPing reasons, which seems to be the reason why the subject is still popular. The average student of classics is either a covert catholic or an anime fan, which clearly speaks as to why people with a tendency to escapism would like to specialize in studying a made up, idealized version of the past. I think it's about time we stop LARPing as Greeks and Romans in the west and come up with something new and better.

[Anonymous No.18903558]

>>18903516
>Classics departments should disband and their subjects should become part of history, literature and philosophy departments
Yes, Classics departments should follow the trends and overspecialize into a billion tiny niches that are good for nothing besides robbing people of the ability to look at an issue from a wider perspective.

>covert catholic or an anime fan

What do these two groups share?

[Anonymous No.18903571]

>>18903282
Question for you anon: How well could you (or your average colleague) actually "read"/translate a work out of school? I've always been curious to know (not in any judgemental way). Great post btw.

[Anonymous No.18903580]

>>18903319

>also i generally disagree that classics is doomed. they resisted theory for a long time, which stagnated the field. now that theory is coming in, it seems to be growing a bit more. also, the oxyrinchous papyri are still myriad, there will be a need for papyrologists for decades

What I was getting at is, how many of those people have read all of Cicero's speeches, or the entire Iliad/Odyssey? How many of them even have time to do things like that? Look at the command of classical languages possessed by a backwoods English cleric in the 19th century and compare that with your own. We have people like >>18903372 doing work on patristics who don't have any bona fide grounding in anything.

There definitely are still some Classicists who truly read Latin and Greek widely, I've been lucky enough to know a couple. But there are many more who are in some rabbit hole of extremely narrow "research". And there are lots of others who teach but don't know what they're talking about, and they can get away with it because so few people really know these languages anymore.

But I can only speak to what I've seen and experienced.

[Anonymous No.18903609]

>>18902611
>muh immigrants
Jesus Christ these ex-people are POISON.
Why won’t they stop imposing their anachronistic cuck-philosophy on the past?

[Anonymous No.18903649]

>>18903609
The future controls the past, simple as, they are in charge, they say what the past was like and they change as they see fit if no resistance large enough to detain it appears.

[Anonymous No.18903654]

>>18903165
At the end of the day, after studying one of more of said philosophical systems, do you really have a way of knowing whether it is "correct" or "incorrect"? One can approach some issue as a Hegelian, Marxist, Heideggerian, Deleuzian, Kantian, Thomist, Utilitarian, or what have you, pick your favorite system - but you generally have no way of proving that one "system" is correct while others are incorrect. Marxism sort of tried this but largely ended up being incorrect.

[Anonymous No.18903675]

>>18903609
They are fanatics, won't stop even when they have what they want, them they will turn to each other to kill those who are too moderate. Can't believe this creatures got where they got with no resistance whatsoever, truly comfort is indeed the civilization killer apparently.

[Anonymous No.18903727]

>>18903558
>overspecialize
A Classics BA is already an overspecialization: you focus on very few texts and very few authors from a single culture in a restricted period of time. I think a thematic focus on history, literature, philosophy or art, would give you a much deeper insight in your subject of study rather than making you the guy who knows all about Greeks and Romans - but doesn't know how history works, has not read a single novel from after ww2, is incapable of thinking philosophically and studies only Plato's myths, and knows nothing about art from the middle ages onward. Subject-specific studies are way less specializing than spending four years of your BA becoming a mildly effective translating/commenting machine for texts you barely understand.

>what do these group share
they take their fiction very seriously

[Anonymous No.18903845]

>>18903558
>covert catholic or anime fan
They're the same people

[Anonymous No.18903991]

>>18903390
new readings of the text
postcol is always interesting with greece, since they felt they were superior to every other group in the Mediterranean; deconstruction with early christian texts is pretty interesting, since it ultimately questions religious authority
dont want to spoil my masters thesis but it is, to some extent, a development on some things that nussbaum has written (i'd like to think its more than that, but this to say that im not the first with these ideas, i just have something else to say that is worth it)
im intentionally being ambiguous because these are unpublished (presenting at conference in a month tho) and i dont want anyone thinking that i'm plagarizing or for others to steal my research
>>18903580
kek im both of those posts
of my faculty, which is 8 i think (so not even huge), the latinists have read all of cicero (they have to for their phd), the hellenists have read the Il. and Od. Better questions is who has read all of thucydides (who HAS read all of thucydides lmao that shit is very difficult)
idk if you understand how difficult it is to get a phd in classics, it requires a large reading list (jn the original of course), and very difficult greek and latin reading exams; sight translation; and a large prose style exam. most programs have their handbook available online for prospective students, you should take a look.

also what do you mean that my research has no grounding? all of my research is straight out of the text

>But there are many more who are in some rabbit hole of extremely narrow "research".
this is the result of the publish-or-perish mindset, which is endorsed fully by schools. also, what do you define as "research" vs research. when it comes to philology, all of it is a rabbit hole of "research" to me, but i dont like philology much

>And there are lots of others who teach but don't know what they're talking about, and they can get away with it because so few people really know these languages anymore
this is academia generally, not just classics. this is all of the humanities, sadly. this is not unique to classics at all, many philosophy departments are arguably worse as well. there is no easy way to fix this, this has existed since the sophists (perhaps before but im ignorant).

>>18903571
i focused on greek for my undergrad, so
in latin, not well
in greek, pretty well
but well enough to get into an MA

[Anonymous No.18904002]

>>18903727
>what do these group share
they take their fiction very seriously
kek, good one

[Anonymous No.18904019]

>>18902678
Ruin the classics

[Anonymous No.18905486]

>>18903654
I guess you can all put it together under some overarching logic and hermeneutics. So, when science is and philosophy is fundamentally looking at nature and trying to understand said nature, then you might do that yourself, creating your own system or working within a system - to your own understanding (of it / said system). You're either trying to phrase the world into langue yourself, from simple action and act-parole, speech acts (from nothing), or you're learning about a history (in the hermeneutic sense) through reading and making your base assumption, which for someone else is just their conscious being and their immediate experience, the system and vocabulary of someone else, adapting it to various degrees - from using just the terms and notions described to basically adhereing to it rather closely.
I would though never recommend and wouldn't call anyone a philosopher who adheres completely and tries to be a purist, because that's not philosophy, philology, or even history, but just repetition of things you couldn't have ever heard as the speaker said them. It's a fallacy, in my opinion.
Even historians and philologists interpret texts and work with them actively. This doesn't mean retelling them as is being done with classics today, but just hte act of translating: of fitting, creating, writing words on the basis of something else. Maybe you could call puritans and literal adherists what people popularly think history as a science is like. I'd say such strict adherence is precisely not science, because it doesn't describe nature, doesn't describe at all, but adapts it in some radical and perveted fashion to be what one thinks nature must be like naturally. Which nature is actually just being with no need for such literal adaption.
What is literal stands on its own, and the same goes for nature. Science is as above described always an act of translation, of interpretion, of perception, of the not-absolute, of erscheinung or appearance which is maybe of some absolute, may that be god or otherwise, but still shines itself, appears to someone, and is itself something, and just shade of the absolute - shade which doesn't shine.

[Anonymous No.18905511]

>>18902611
fuck off warmonger

On Homer’s Poetry

EVERY poem must necessarily be a perfect Unity, but why Homer’s is peculiarly so I cannot tell: he has told the story of Bellerophon, and omitted the Judgement of Paris, which is not only a part but a principal part of Homer’s subject.
But when a work has Unity, it is as much in a part as in the whole. The Torso is as much a Unity as the Laocoon.
As Unity is the cloak of Folly, so Goodness is the cloak of Knavery. Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer come out with a Moral like a sting in the tail. Aristotle says Characters are either good or bad; now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character. An apple tree, a pear tree, a horse, a lion are Characters; but a good apple tree or a bad is an apple tree still: a horse is not more a lion for being a bad horse; that is its Character: its Goodness or Badness is another consideration.
It is the same with the Moral of a whole poem as with the Moral Goodness of its parts. Unity and Morality are secondary considerations, and belong to Philosophy and not to poetry, to Exception and not to Rule, to Accident and not to Substance. The Ancients called it eating of the Tree of Good and Evil.
The Classics! it is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with wars.


On Virgil

SACRED TRUTH has pronounced that Greece and Rome, as Babylon and Egypt, so far from being parents of Arts and Sciences as they pretend, were destroyers of all Art. Homer, Virgil and Ovid confirm this opinion, and make us reverence the Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by War. Virgil in the Æneid, Book vi, line 848, says ‘Let others study Art: Rome has somewhat better to do, namely War and Dominion’.
Rome and Greece swept Art into their maw and destroyed it; a warlike State never can produce Art. It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one place, and translate and copy and buy and sell and criticize, but not make. Grecian is Mathematic Form: Gothic is Living Form. Mathematic Form is eternal in the Reasoning Memory: Living Form is Eternal Existence.

[Anonymous No.18906412]

>>18903991
>postcol is always interesting with greece, since they felt they were superior to every other group in the Mediterranean; deconstruction with early christian texts is pretty interesting, since it ultimately questions religious authority
>dont want to spoil my masters thesis but it is, to some extent, a development on some things that nussbaum has written (i'd like to think its more than that, but this to say that im not the first with these ideas, i just have something else to say that is worth it)
>im intentionally being ambiguous because these are unpublished (presenting at conference in a month tho) and i dont want anyone thinking that i'm plagarizing or for others to steal my research

How do you feel about the fact that academia shits the likes of you out by the hundreds every year?

[Anonymous No.18906439]

>>18903609
Don't look at the author's twitter if you don't want to get any angrier. Guy is bizarrely laser-focused on immigration. He's also gay and looks jewish, he has another book where he talks about the early christian community in Rome as an analogous thing to contemporary gay subculture. It's called "Coming out as Christian".