Too General or Arcane? Didactic or Funny? Introducing The Digital Democratising Classics Library: Maggenti: I think that the tension that emerges around AIDS is that it’s not a gay disease, right? But, in fact, there are a lot of gay men who have AIDS. So, in fact, it’s gay/lesbian people who are doing the work […]
Show me the Money! Classics, taste and the well-to-do middle class In the futuristic dreams of the ad men of the twenties, there soon would be a world in which ads would provide a common idiom of expression; language and communication would take on the role of constant selling; and the ongoing discontent with things […]
Judgment on Trial: Ancient Myths and Modern Ideologies The courtroom has always been a charged symbolic site; legal process and crime now dominate the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent. There televised trials and televised manhunts, encouraging the fantasy of “solving” crime by forcing individual criminals through the mangle of publicity. Politics and crime are […]
Whose Canon? Bringing Iphigenia and Plato Closer to Home [T]he canon, that transparent decanter of Western values – Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Whose Canon is it, anyway?”, in Group Material Democracy (Education and Democracy section), p. 72. Dominant ideologies, usually with a nationalistic streak, have used the classical canon as a propaganda machine—primarily through […]