A01=University of Wisconsin Press
Author_University of Wisconsin Press
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
Category=JBCC
Category=NHB
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780299171247
- Weight: 493g
- Dimensions: 151 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2001
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Classicism = cultural embezziement? History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial emblem for much of Western thought and literature. Grafting Helen looks at ""classicism"" - the privileged thetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West - as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin of the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted, and coverted once again. Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.
Matthew Gumpert is assistant professor of core curriculum at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He has taught comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Harvard University. His published work includes the English translation of Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sistera's Death by Mieke Bal.
