Böcker av Page DuBois

This study offers a different reading of the archaic lesbian poet, Sappho, whose poetry dates from the seventh century BC. Her presentation of many certitudes in the history of poetry, philosophy and sexuality are featured here.

To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation. How is it then, Page duBois asks, that this poet has come to signify so much? Sappho Is Burning offers a new reading of this archaic Lesbian poet that acknowledges the poet's distance and difference from us. It stresses Sappho's inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject. In Sappho Is Burning, duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive figure at the very origin of our story of Western civilization. Sappho is beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of reductively linear accounts of a common history. She is a woman, but also an aristocrat; a Greek, but one turned toward Asia; a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy; a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients, troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. DuBois argues that we need to read Sappho again.

"This book revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics and how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. It critiques the neglect that Greek comedy has suffered due to our great affection for tragedy as a model of democracy and offers a remedy. The Greeks loved their comedies as much or even more than their tragedies. The book focuses on the collective aspects of ancient drama, especially comedy, with its swarming choruses that are represented as wielding great if ambivalent power within and beyond the confines of the dramatic setting. DuBois shows how ancient comedy (including, but not limited to, plays by Aristophanes), its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses and rebellious women can be used to establish another model of democracy, one grounded in the collective. DuBois advocates for a broader view that takes into account the resistant communal legacy of comedy, the roar of the demos or the disenfranchised, not just the individual voices of the powerful"--

Presents a more complex and accurate view of ancient Greek politics, sex, and religion. This title recounts the tales of Daedalus and Artemis, for example, conveying their complexity and passion, while also unearthing actions and beliefs that do not square so easily with "family values."

As A Million and One Gods shows, polytheism is considered a scandalous presence in societies oriented to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Yet it persists, even in the West, perhaps because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies.

Page duBois incorporates insights from postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theories into her nuanced close readings of ancient Greek texts. Out of Athens establishes a daring agenda for the next generation of Classicists and, for both the intimate friend of Greek texts and the freshly arrived reader, makes ancient Greeks new.