What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity and wit its soul (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) In her book on “Poetic closure”, Barbara Herrnstein Smith envisioned a poem of maximal closure as “pre-eminently teleological” and “in a sense […] suicidal […], for all of its… Read more
Far from getting to the bottom of things, tracing the origin of riddles, or understanding the material basis of character, I would like to use this blog as an opportunity to “think out loud” about what worries me most these days, namely the flow of time… The ephemere medium of… Read more
Oh no, not again! I’m threatening to annoy our new readership by posting another blog entry on Aristotle. After all, Mariska’s post from yesterday already may have gotten the blood-a-boilin’ for some of you (although, if you were to have the pleasure of reading… Read more
One of the three earliest attestations of rhapsôidós occurs in Sophokles’ Oidipous Tyrannos 391. If you do not remember the identity of the rhapsode, you may be surprised to read that it is the Sphinx, the bane of Thebes. Why does Sophokles call her a… Read more
My awareness of CHS’s interest in the future of scholarly publishing was one of the reasons why I was eager to come to Washington this semester. As manager of a research center and a part-time librarian (i.e., someone who lies awake at night worrying about budgets), this… Read more
