{"title":"Greek theatre, electric lights, and the plumes of locomotives: the quarrel between the Futurists and the Classicists and the Hellenic modernism of Fascism","authors":"Eleftheria Ioannidou","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The controversy between the Futurists and the classicists over the Greek theatre of Syracuse remains largely overlooked within the scholarship concerned with the relationship between Futurism and Fascism. The Futurist movement launched a polemic against the staging of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers in 1921, counterposing Greek tragedy to new forms of drama drawing on Futurist performance aesthetics and Sicilian popular theatre which, according to the Futurists, could express the spirit of the modern age. In a similar vein, the manifesto that F. T. Marinetti addressed to the Fascist government in 1923 advocated for the staging of modern Sicilian plays in the theatre of Syracuse. Contrary to Futurism, Italian Fascism turned to Greek models in creating new forms of popular theatre. Mussolini’s state supported the production of ancient drama throughout the ventennio, as evidenced by the consolidation of the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico (INDA) in 1925. The theatre of Syracuse should be viewed as a field of antagonism between the different versions of modernism represented by Futurism and Fascism. By examining the convergences and divergences of Futurist and Fascist visions of theatrical renewal, this article highlights not only the Hellenic character of Fascism’s modernism but also the role of Fascism in transforming classical traditions.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"27 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139456595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Giovanna Di Martino, Eleftheria Ioannidou, Sara Troiani
{"title":"Introduction A Hellenic Modernism: Greek Theatre and Italian Fascism","authors":"Giovanna Di Martino, Eleftheria Ioannidou, Sara Troiani","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad026","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The introduction to the special issue explores the central place of Greek theatre within the culture of Italian Fascism. Building on scholarship from the so-called cultural turn in the study of fascism, which variously identified fascism with a form of modernism, it demonstrates that a dialogue between modernism and classicism was fully at work in the performances of ancient drama occurring all over the Italian peninsula and in the colonies in North Africa. The term ‘Hellenic modernism’ is introduced here to underline the fusion of Greek theatre with distinctively modernist traits during the ventennio and provide an analytical tool for investigating the role of classical performances and spectacles within Fascism’s programme of cultural and national renewal.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"94 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139454297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lycanthropus adulescens: the Classical element in MTV’s Teen Wolf (2011–17)","authors":"Javier Martínez Jiménez","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad030","url":null,"abstract":"The adaptation of elements of Greek and Roman myth and folklore is a recurrent aspect of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction on page and screen. These elements are usually presented alongside other mythologies and they, over all, serve to add depth and veracity to the world-building. This is no different in Teen Wolf, an MTV show that focused on Scott McCall’s journey through lycanthropy. However, in most modern fiction the Classical element is one of many sources used in in-story world-building. This paper will present the many examples of the use of Classical elements in Teen Wolf, including: the way the werewolves are presented as Lycaon’s descendants and with elements common to Roman versipelles, the way the Classical past (historic, folkloric, mythic) is included as part of the intradiegetic lore, and how the show itself is built following ancient epic patterns with Classical paradigms as points of reference.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139169332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Dance against the void’: Derek Jarman, dance, queer classical receptions","authors":"Marcus Bell","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad020","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers three moments from the beginning, middle and end of Derek Jarman’s artistic career: Lindsay Kemp’s opening dance in Sebastiane (1976), Jarman’s words on a performance by Michael Clark in the 1980s, and Jarman’s last film Blue (1993), while holding onto the affective registers of his final diary entry (1994). Considering the ways in which Jarman indexed the ephemeral myth-making processes of queer life and art, the author develops a new kinetic-temporal methodology for exploring reception based on the fleeting queer modalities of dance. As such this article makes a series of important connections between classical reception studies, queer theory, critical theory, and dance studies. It argues that, despite the fleeting, erotic, and partial engagements with the past offered by Jarman — which challenges ideas of fixity or lineage — an identification nevertheless emerges with the hierarchies of white supremacist Imperialism.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138579236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medea/Media: a glitchy counterfactual","authors":"Mario Telò, Catherine Conybeare","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad019","url":null,"abstract":"James Ijames, the winner of a 2022 Pulitzer prize for Fat Ham, loosely based on Hamlet, has just presented a new realization of Medea, Media/Medea, which had its world premiere at Bryn Mawr College and the Community College of Philadelphia in April 2023. This article provides a reading of it, addressing the themes of irony, queer ‘authenticity’, acting, and mothering through the framing of the ‘glitchy counterfactual’ — a conceit we borrow from Legacy Russell’s manifesto for a new Black cyberfeminism to approach the most blatant innovation in Ijames’s version, the unfulfilled infanticide. This astonishing change in the script, which tightly connects Medea with her onomastic negativity and queer unbecoming, urges us to reflect upon survival and survivance in an anti-Black world; it might yield a reckoning in line with Kevin Quashie’s notion of ‘subjunctivity’, Black ‘aliveness’.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138530342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forging lesbians: Sappho and The Songs of Bilitis","authors":"Cat Lambert","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad022","url":null,"abstract":"In Les Chansons de Bilitis (‘The Songs of Bilitis’, 1894), Pierre Louÿs purports to have translated into French for the first time the long-lost Greek poems of Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. Classicists have often heralded Bilitis as a watershed moment for reclaiming the lesbian Sappho from the clutches of homophobic, misogynist philologists. This paper complicates this narrative by reframing Bilitis as an object that participates in a broader cultural — and potentially queer — history of forgery. Rather than categorizing Bilitis as a forgery per se, I use forgery (and related textual practices) as a lens for illuminating how Louÿs ‘plays’ the forger and how this performance relates to readers’ divergent desires and reactions. This lens also brings into focus the queer dynamics and effects of this text in relation to Sappho’s corpus. At the same time, following Kadji Amin’s cue to ‘deidealize queerness’ (2017), I show how such queer dynamics are inextricable from colonialist and patriarchal relations of power, in particular an Orientalizing tradition of forgeries by white European and American men. This framework illuminates the affective and political ramifications of forging queer narratives and identifications through the medium of this curious artefact.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"217 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138530341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to: Placing ‘moderns’ in a ‘classic’ series: the case of J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134908419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘The words of a nation worn down by cares’: classical wisdom and modern crisis in Lin Shu’s <i>Aesop’s Fables</i>","authors":"Benjamin Porteous","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyses the remarkable translation of Aesop’s Fables produced by the Chinese literatus-turned-cultural-impresario Lin Shu [林紓; 1852–1924] at the turn of the twentieth century. Collaborating with colleagues proficient in English, which he himself was not, Lin translated the Fables into elegant Classical Chinese. This article examines the preface to the translation, which uses Aesop’s status as an enduring classical figure in Western education to argue for the continuing relevance of Classical Chinese in newly constituted school curricula. More importantly though, this article probes at the voluminous epimythia Lin composed for most of the fables in the collection. Written immediately after the humiliating Boxer Protocol, these present a feisty critique of Western imperialism in China. They range in topic from China’s lack of cultural self-confidence to comparative reflection on the status of enslaved Africans in the antebellum USA. A confident and wilful reader of texts, in Lin’s hands the Fables become a foil for razor-edged polemic. His translation is surely one of the most culturally significant in the Fables’ long and murky textual history, and represents an overlooked monument of classical reception in an East Asia teetering on the violent edge of modernity.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"125 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135967692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Commemorative Architecture, Periclean Athens and the Polish Revolution of 1791: Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier’s Parthenon-Inspired Temple for Warsaw","authors":"Mikołaj Getka-Kenig","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier’s design for the Temple of Providence in Warsaw, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s capital, is the earliest known evidence of European fascination with the Parthenon as a model for modern commemorative architecture. However, it was this proposal’s specific political context which makes it especially interesting from the perspective of classical reception studies. It was an artistic reaction of an aristocratic philhellene to the destructive tendencies of the French Revolution on the eve of the Bourbon monarchy’s abolition. The choice of the Parthenon was expressive of Choiseul-Gouffier’s admiration for the idealized heritage of ancient aristocratic republicanism and its alleged relevance to the political culture of the modern ‘republic’ of Poland-Lithuania.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42517475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}