Redefining classics for the 21st century

We usually treat ancient Greece as a closed system, a discrete, limited set of texts with more or less established meanings. But a new generation of classicists, steeped in the insights afforded by contemporary theory, are beginning to show how that view cannot hold as much water as it once did. Shaking off the stuffy image traditionally attached to interpretations of ancient Greece, Page duBois here presents a series of case studies that explode the boundaries of what is still referred to as “classics.” In Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks, duBois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, shakes our conventional hierarchies of analysis by situating Athens not at the center of the Hellenic world, but as one set of voices among many, part of a web of connections that stretches from Vedic India to ancient China to the polyglot city of Alexandria. In encouraging us to think of the ancient Greeks as part of a universe rather than the universe itself, duBois expands the range of inquiry in a once-hidebound discipline across space and time, showing how an engagement with contemporary theory—reading Athenian tragedy and the poetry of Sappho alongside the works of Judith Butler and Alain Badiou—can illuminate the ways in which classical antiquity reaches into our own time. With Out of Athens, duBois has mapped an ambitious agenda for a new generation of classicists and shown us how rethinking our perspectives can make the oldest civilizations new once again.

||| Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks