Böcker i Classical Receptions in Twenti-serien

In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life. This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth.

This book opens up new perspectives on the English fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, arguing that he was an influential thinker of utopianism in 20th-century fiction and that his scrutiny of utopias can be assessed through his dialogue with antiquity. Tolkien's engagement with the ancient world often reflects an interest in retrotopianism: his fictional places - cities, forests, homes - draw on a rich (post-)classical narrative imagination of similar spaces. Importantly for Tolkien, such narratives entail 'eutopian' thought experiments: the decline and fall of distinctly 'classical' communities provide an utopian blueprint for future political restorations; the home as oikos becomes a space where an ideal ethical reciprocity between host and guest can be sought; the 'ancient forest' is an ambiguous, unsettling site where characters can experience necessary forms of awakening. From these perspectives, tokens of Platonic moderation, Augustan restoration, Homeric xenophilia, and the Ovidian material sublime are evident in Tolkien's writing. Likewise, his retrotopianism also always entails a rewriting of ancient narratives in post-classical and modern terms. This study then explores how Tolkien's use of the classical past can help us to align classical and utopian studies, and thus to reflect on the ranges and limits of utopianism in classical literature and thought.