Dear all, The Critical Antiquities Network is launching a new initiative called the Studio for Critical Antiquities, hosted by the Australian National University. This forum is designed to support work in formation for early career scholars working at any kind of interface between antiquity and critical theory. It will run twice a semester alongside the Critical Antiquities Workshop. Unlike the Workshop, sessions in the Studio will be dedicated mostly to discussing a pre-circulated sample of the speaker's work. More information about the Studio (including forthcoming events) can be found here<https://www.criticalantiquities.org/studio>.
For our first event, we are thrilled to host Ben Radcliffe (Loyola Marymount University) to discuss his current project 'Sensing Labor in the Iliad'. Ben has generously agreed to circulate a draft chapter from this project. Ben will introduce the material at the beginning of the session, but we recommend reading the chapter in advance if you have time. If you would like a copy of the chapter and intend to participate in the session, please send an email to [email protected] by Monday 9 March. We also ask that you register for the Critical Antiquities Network mailing list if you haven't done so already (see below). This event will be held on Zoom on Wednesday 18 March, 9.30-11am (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne time). Here is the time in other locations: * Los Angeles/Vancouver: Tuesday 17 March, 3.30-5pm * Chicago: Tuesday 17 March, 5.30-7pm * Mexico City: Tuesday 17 March, 4.30-6pm * New York: Tuesday 17 March, 6.30-8pm * Santiago/Buenos Aires/Rio de Janeiro: Tuesday 17 March, 7.30-9pm * Dublin/Belfast/London: Tuesday 17 March, 10.30pm-12am * Paris/Berlin/Rome: Tuesday 17 March, 11.30pm-1.00am * Johannesburg/Athens/Cairo: Wednesday 18 March, 12.30-2.00am * Beijing/Singapore/Perth: Wednesday 18 March, 6.30-8.00am * Tokyo: Wednesday 18 March, 7.30-9.00am * Darwin: Wednesday 18 March, 8.00-9.30am * Brisbane: Wednesday 18 March, 8.30-10.00am * Adelaide: Wednesday 18 March, 9.00-10.30am * Auckland/Wellington: Wednesday 18 March, 11.30am-1.00pm To register, please sign up for the Critical Antiquities Network mailing list to receive Zoom links and CAN announcements: https://signup.e2ma.net/signup/1930251/1916146 Here is the abstract: Sensing Labor in the Iliad My book project examines poetics and political economy in Homer and Hesiod. It explores how epic narratives attend to their social infrastructure, to the work of slaves, artisans, and wage laborers who produce the wealth that sustains the genre’s landowning protagonists. “The world of epic,” understood as a fictive social order, has been studied intensively for clues about its historical and ideological content. This project aims to reconceptualize one component of this world, its political economy, as an aesthetic process. It asks how the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Works and Days condition their audiences to project a coherent totality from abundant but scattered details—about labor, commodities, and social domination—presented in the margins of the narratives. It also asks how these glimpses of an encompassing social context variously enrich and destabilize the epics’ poetic agendas. Drawing on recent developments in Marxian literary theory, the project understands the epic economy as a conflicted aesthetic terrain in which the labor of epic’s elites is valorized and reified even as audiences are led to detect its dependence on the exploited labor of minor characters and perceive narrative pathways foreclosed by the genre’s social form. Looking forward to seeing you there! Tristan Bradshaw Ben Brown Tom Geue Andy Poe --------- SydPhil mailing list To unsubscribe, change your membership options, find answers to common problems, or visit our online archives, please go to the list information page: https://mailman.sydney.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil
