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"Thomas Van Nortwick"
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The unknown Odysseus
The Unknown Odysseus is a study of how Homer creates two versions of his hero, one who is the triumphant protagonist of the revenge plot and another, more subversive, anonymous figure whose various personae exemplify an entirely different set of assumptions about the world through which each hero moves and about the shape and meaning of human life. Separating the two perspectives allows us to see more clearly how the poem's dual focus can begin to explain some of the notorious difficulties readers have encountered in thinking about the Odyssey. In The Unknown Odysseus, Thomas Van Nortwick offers the most complete exploration to date of the implications of Odysseus' divided nature, showing how it allows Homer to explore the riddles of human identity in a profound way that is not usually recognized by studies focusing on only one \"real\" hero in the narrative. This new perspective on the epic enriches the world of the poem in a way that will interest both general readers and classical scholars.
eBook
Late Sophocles : the hero's evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus
\"Only a few plays by Sophocles--one of the great tragic playwrights from Classical Athens--have survived, and each of them dramatizes events from the rich store of myths that framed literature and art. Sophocles' treatment evokes issues that were vividly contemporary for Athenian audiences of the Periclean age: How could the Athenians incorporate older, aristocratic ideas about human excellence into their new democratic society? Could citizens learn to be morally excellent, or were these qualities only inherited? What did it mean to be a creature who knows that he or she must die? Late Sophocles traces the evolution of the Sophoclean hero through the final three plays, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The book's main thesis, that Sophocles reimagined the nature of the tragic hero in his last three works, is developed inductively through readings of the plays. This balanced approach, in which a detailed argument about the plays is offered in a format accessible to nonspecialists, is unusual--perhaps unique--in contemporary Classical scholarship on Sophocles. This book will appeal to nonspecialist readers of serious literature as well as scholars of classical and other literatures. While including ample guidance for those not familiar with the plays, Late Sophocles goes beyond a generalized description of \"what happens\" in the plays to offer a clear, jargon-free argument for the enduring importance of Sophocles' plays. The argument's implications for longstanding interpretational issues will be of interest to specialists. All Greek is translated.\" -- Publisher's description
BOOK
Compromising Traditions
Compromising Traditions is the first collection of theoretically informed autobiographical writing in the field of classical studies which aims to create a more expansive and authoritative form of classical scholarship.
eBook
Riding the Archway Circuit: Public Humanities and the Future of Classical Learning
The events of the 20th century offers a chilling proof of how ideas appropriated from earlier times can lead to insane cruelty and destruction. If one wants Classical antiquity to continue to offer paradigms--either negative or positive--for the present, one must be willing to take the responsibility for shaping how these cultures are presented to nonspecialists. Here, Van Nortwick talks about his lecture the Odyssey and the idea of family. He discusses how the experience of living in a family influences the way a person understands himself in larger communities. And the Odyssey will be an important source for reflections.
Journal Article
THE ATHENS OLYMPICS, Lessons from the ancients, The Greeks craved competition and loved to win, but they knew the potential cost of glorifying victory
Now is the season of the Greeks. The film \"Troy\" this spring and the opening of the Olympics in Athens remind us of the enduring fascination for us of that ancient civilization and have led inevitably to debates over who the Greeks \"really\" were, and why we must be careful when appropriating their culture for our own use. We might say that the Greeks, though much like us in their honoring of competitive virtues, also embraced, to a much greater degree than we do, competition in ideas. Their artists and intellectuals shared a commitment to pursuing an idea for its own sake, whether they thought it was \"practical\" or not. The emphasis in Greek artistic expression of all kinds is on pushing beyond the flux of everyday experience toward the underlying structures that inform the universe. It is no accident that the first analytical philosophy we have is Greek, or that statues like the Venus de Milo seem to reach beyond the particular toward a universal ideal. Neither is it accidental that Athenian tragic drama appears at exactly the same time as Athenian democracy, both coming to their fullest expression in Periclean Athens. Both are reflections of the Greeks' love of competing ideas. The plays are built around the clash of values and ideas - aristocratic notions of inherited excellence versus new claims for the worth of collective democratic wisdom, the lonely, irascible hero pitted against his more ordinary but also more humane fellow citizens - with little attempt to provide any real resolution at the end.
Newspaper Article
\Flores Mali\: Catullus and Baudelaire
Similarities between Gaius Vaerius Catullus's writings and those of Charles Pierre Baudelaire are examined. In their defiance, both men asserted a new sensibility, and Catullus could be described as the first \"bohemian\" poet.
Journal Article