April 16, 2015
McCloskey to present lecture on literary, linguistic and cultural matters April 17
Benjamin McCloskey, instructor in modern languages, will present a Modern Languages' Signatures Lecture on literary, linguistic and cultural matters at 3 p.m. Friday, April 17, in 301 Hale Library.
The title of the lecture is "Who is 'I'? Narrative Identity in Xenophon of Athens."
Today, the Greek writer Xenophon, who lived from 430-354 BC, is often condescended — even mocked — as embarrassingly incoherent as a Socratic, a liar and an idiot. After contextualizing Xenophon within the field of Classical Studies and within the literature of Greece, this talk will introduce the problem of Xenophon. McCloskey argues that the key to understanding Xenophon as coherent paradoxically lies in appreciating the incoherence of his corpus' many anonymous narrators on their own terms.