“It feels insensitive or dishonest to not acknowledge the ways in which our work is a part of a greater narrative.”
Tag: Classics
On Dressing Down Myth
“I research specific instances of Black artists who strip themselves out of mythologized dressings around race, sexuality, and gender.”
Finding Nowhere
What does the ancient world look like beyond Greece and Rome? Could imagining a collective human future start with seeing the past anew?
Four Ways to Ruin Dante—and One to Save Him
Why would Dante need help? Because if the poet’s only readers are Dante scholars, then we’ll all lose out. Dante deserves better, and so do we.
B-Sides: Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai”
Impossible to summarize, The Last Samurai is deeply political—anti-capitalist and thoroughly feminist—without ever becoming preachy or moralizing.
The “Decameron”; or, How to Laugh through a Pandemic
Whereas the Black Death was reason to cultivate individualism, our own pandemic leads to an opposite conclusion: our need to help one another.
Helen of West Hollywood
It hardly seems necessary to offer a spoiler alert for news that is well over two millennia old. But some news is so surprising, so contrary to everything we thought we knew, that time can do little ...
Madeline Miller on “Circe,” Mythological Realism, and Literary Correctives
Madeline Miller is a Boston-born writer who currently lives in Philadelphia. Her degrees include a BA and ...
The Return of Homer’s Women
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, and Madeline Miller’s Circe speak the lost and muted voices of ancient Greek women ...