Plato Goes To China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism
Princeton University Press
This book in an entirely new field provides a provocative look at Chinese politics and ideology through contemporary Chinese readings of ancient Greek classical texts. At the same time, it restores value to the much maligned “dead white men” of Western antiquity by showing, paradoxically enough, how much they matter to another culture. In chapters that discuss Plato, Aristotle, the Jesuits, Confucius, and even Xi Jinping, the author analyzes the pre- and post-Tiananmen Square about-face in the Chinese interpretation of the western classics. Concepts familiar to the western philosophical and political tradition (rationality, citizen, and democracy, to name only a few) are either emptied of value, appropriated, or turned on their heads in nationalist Chinese interpretations of the great Greek thinkers. Plato’s “Noble Lie” is lauded, along with its genetic implications; Aristotle’s “Politics” turns out to be nothing less than brainwashing; and Thucydides’ criticism of Athenian democracy turns out to be all too prescient of modern America. The book ends with a study of Xi Jinping’s continued policy of “the harmonious society” (directly connected to Confucian, but not Socratic, teaching) as a principle of both domestic and foreign policy. In a time when we ask what the classics have left to teach us, the new China is answering that question in a very topical—and political—way.
“In China, the classics are alive: They shape how people think about contemporary society and politics. The revival of Chinese classics has been well-documented. Surprisingly, the Greek classics also provide inspiration for Chinese intellectuals, political reformers, and (more recently) defenders of the status quo. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer’s masterful study illuminates this fascinating cross-cultural encounter. It’s impossible not to learn from her strikingly original book.” Daniel A. Bell
Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural
The University of Chicago Press
The Roman poet and satirist Persius (34–62 CE) was unique among his peers for lampooning literary and social conventions from a distinctly Stoic point of view. A curious amalgam of mocking wit and philosophy, his Satires are rife with violent metaphors and unpleasant imagery and show little concern for the reader’s enjoyment or understanding.
In Persius, Shadi Bartsch explores this Stoic framework and argues that Persius sets his own bizarre metaphors of food, digestion, and sexuality against more appealing imagery to show that the latter―and the poetry containing it―harms rather than helps its audience. Ultimately, he encourages us to abandon metaphor altogether in favor of the non-emotive abstract truths of Stoic philosophy, to live in a world where neither alluring poetry, nor rich food, nor sexual charm play a role in philosophical teaching.
The Mirror of the Self: Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire
The University of Chicago Press
People in the ancient world thought of vision as both an ethical tool and a tactile sense, akin to touch. Gazing upon someone—or oneself—was treated as a path to philosophical self-knowledge, but the question of tactility introduced an erotic element as well. In The Mirror of the Self, Shadi Bartsch asserts that these links among vision, sexuality, and self-knowledge are key to the classical understanding of the self.
Weaving together literary theory, philosophy, and social history, Bartsch traces this complex notion of self from Plato’s Greece to Seneca’s Rome. She starts by showing how ancient authors envisioned the mirror as both a tool for ethical self-improvement and, paradoxically, a sign of erotic self-indulgence. Her reading of the Phaedrus, for example, demonstrates that the mirroring gaze in Plato, because of its sexual possibilities, could not be adopted by Roman philosophers and their students. Bartsch goes on to examine the Roman treatment of the ethical and sexual gaze, and she traces how self-knowledge, the philosopher’s body, and the performance of virtue all played a role in shaping the Roman understanding of the nature of selfhood. Culminating in a profoundly original reading of Medea, The Mirror of the Self illustrates how Seneca, in his Stoic quest for self-knowledge, embodies the Roman view, marking a new point in human thought about self-perception.
Bartsch leads readers on a journey that unveils divided selves, moral hypocrisy, and lustful Stoics—and offers fresh insights about seminal works. At once sexy and philosophical, The Mirror of the Self will be required reading for classicists, philosophers, and anthropologists alike.
Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s Civil War
Harvard University Press
Is Lucan’s brilliant and grotesque epic Civil War an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that despairingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers a startlingly new answer to this split debate on the Roman poet’s magnum opus.
Reflecting on the disintegration of the Roman republic in the wake of the civil war that began in 49 B.C., Lucan (writing during the grim tyranny of Nero’s Rome) recounts that fateful conflict with a strangely ambiguous portrayal of his republican hero, Pompey. Although the story is one of a tragic defeat, the language of his epic is more often violent and nihilistic than heroic and tragic. And Lucan is oddly fascinated by the graphic destruction of lives, the violation of human bodies—an interest paralleled in his deviant syntax and fragmented poetry. In an analysis that draws on contemporary political thought ranging from Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty to the poetry of Vietnam veterans, as well as on literary theory and ancient sources, Bartsch finds in the paradoxes of Lucan’s poetry both a political irony that responds to the universally perceived need for, yet suspicion of, ideology, and a recourse to the redemptive power of storytelling. This shrewd and lively book contributes substantially to our understanding of Roman civilization and of poetry as a means of political expression.
Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian
Harvard University Press
When Nero took the stage, the audience played along–or else. The drama thus enacted, whether in the theater proper or in the political arena, unfolds in all its rich complexity in Actors in the Audience. This is a book about language, theatricality, and empire–about how the Roman emperor dramatized his rule and how his subordinates in turn staged their response. The focus is on Nero: his performances onstage spurred his contemporaries to reflect on the nature of power and representation, and to make the stage a paradigm for larger questions about the theatricality of power. Through these portrayals by ancient writers, Shadi Bartsch explores what happens to language and representation when all discourse is distorted by the pull of an autocratic authority.
Some Roman senators, forced to become actors and dissimulators under the scrutinizing eye of the ruler, portrayed themselves and their class as the victims of regimes that are, for us, redolent of Stalinism. Other writers claimed that doublespeak–saying one thing and meaning two–was the way one could, and did, undo the constraining effects of imperial oppression. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal all figure in Bartsch’s shrewd analysis of historical and literary responses to the brute facts of empire; even the Panegyricus of Pliny the Younger now appears as a reaction against the widespread awareness of dissimulation. Informed by theories of dramaturgy, sociology, new historicism, and cultural criticism, this close reading of literary and historical texts gives us a new perspective on the politics of the Roman empire–and on the languages and representation of power.
Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius
Princeton University Press
Using a reader-oriented approach, Shadi Bartsch reconsiders the role of detailed descriptive accounts in the ancient Greek novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius and in so doing offers a new view of the genre itself. Bartsch demonstrates that these passages, often misunderstood as mere ornamental devices, form in fact an integral part of the narrative proper, working to activate the audience’s awareness of the play of meaning in the story. As the crucial elements in the evolution of a relationship in which the author arouses and then undermines the expectations of his readership, these passages provide the key to a better understanding and interpretation of these two most sophisticated of the ancient Greek romances.
In many works of the Second Sophistic, descriptions of visual conveyors of meaning–artworks and dreams–signaled the presence of a deeper meaning. This meaning was revealed in the texts themselves through an interpretation furnished by the author. The two novels at hand, however, manipulate this convention of hermeneutic description by playing upon their readers’ expectations and luring them into the trap of incorrect exegesis. Employed for different ends in the context of each work, this process has similar implications in both for the relationship between reader and author as it arises out of the former’s involvement with the text.