1,720,983 research outputs found
Healing Grief: A Commentary on Seneca's Consolatio ad Marciam
Full text linkBoth our view of Seneca’s philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca’s intellectual program, strategies, and context.
A crucial document to penetrate Seneca’s discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Marcia’s grief and correcting her cognitive distortions. Through close reading of the Latin text, this commentary shows that Seneca invariably adapts different traditions and voices – from Greek consolations to Plato’s dialogues, from the Roman discourse of gender and exemplarity to epic poetry – to a Stoic framework, so as to give his reader a lucid understanding of the limits of the self and the ineluctability of natural laws
Virgil on Libertas: Before and After Actium
No full textThe last twenty years have witnessed a significant advance in our understanding of the conceptual history of 'libertas', especially with regard to the crucial transition from Republic to Empire. It has been convincingly shown that in the first century BC 'libertas' was much more than “a convenient term of political fraud” – to quote Syme’s influential definition – and that an epoch-making conceptual transition occurred in the 40s BC, when, moving away from a juridical notion, the idea of 'libertas' acquired a new moral and universalistic dimension, centered round the 'iudicium' of individual men. In the present paper, I shall attempt to set the only five occurrences of the word 'libertas' in Virgil’s oeuvre against the background of their time and milieu – an attempt that will inevitably result in the exploration of Virgil’s stance before and after Actium, for two of these occurrences appear in Eclogue 1 and three of them can be found in the Aeneid. Both a ‘traditional’ (or ‘communal’) and a ‘revisionist’ (or ‘personalistic’) view of 'libertas' surface in Virgil’s writings, thus reminding us once again of Virgil’s richly ambiguous vision as a poet suspended between the trauma of the civil wars and Augustan discourse. Virgil’s poetry seems to bear witness to the on-going (and still incomplete) assimilation of the new role model of the Libertatis Vindex – which first appears in Eclogue 1 with the 'deus' Octavian (Ecl. 1.27-32) and later re-emerges in Aeneid 6 with L. Junius Brutus, the founder of the 'res publica', judge of his own sons, and ancestor of Caesar’s murderer (Aen. 6. 817-823). Besides these two symbolically meaningful occurrences there are two other passages from the Aeneid – in Books 8 (646-651) and 11 (346-351) – which attest more clearly to Virgil’s persisting memory of the collective experience of 'libertas'
Lucrezio e Carlo Magno. A proposito dell’epistola di Dungal sulle eclissi (MGH Epistolae IV Karolini aevi II, pp. 570-578)
No full textIt is generally assumed that Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura disappeared with the end of antiquity and did not reappear until Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery (1417). Yet, the oldest and most valuable manuscripts of DRN were copied in the Carolingian age and reflect a high degree of attention to Lucretius’ text and its content. In the present paper, I argue that by studying more carefully the origin and diffusion of Lucretian manuscripts in Carolingian Europe, it is possible to detect an
almost unrecognized connection between textual tradition, grammatical erudition, and literary imitatio. In the first section, I
offer an overview of the reception of DRN in such representative ninth-century writers as Ermenrich of Ellwangen, Heiric of
Auxerre, Walahfrid Strabo, and John Scottus Eriugena. In these authors, very much as in Augustan and imperial Latin literature, the echo of Lucretius’ poetry can be perceived through the filter of allusion, intertextuality, and intergeneric adaptation. In the second section, I focus on the special case of Dungal, an Irish monk, scholar, and writer who migrated to Charlemagne’s court and has been identified by Bernhard Bischoff with the 'corrector Saxonicus' of Lucretius’ Codex Oblongus. Dungal’s familiarity with the text of DRN is mirrored in his 811 letter to Charlemagne on the eclipses (MGH Epistolae IV Karolini aevi II, pp. 570-578). Even if Macrobius and Pliny are prominent among Dungal’s ancient sources, Lucretius’ astronomical doctrine and history of humankind seem to have left a trace in the letter’s literary background. Moreover, Dungal’s acceptance of the antipodes theory might help explain the textual condition of Lucr. 1, 1068-1075 in the Codex Oblongus
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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