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DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR PRESENTS THE 2003 CHARLES BEEBE MARTIN CLASSICAL LECTURES
FEBRUARY 10, 2003--Distinguished scholar Gregory Nagy will present the 2003 Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lecture series at Oberlin College March 3, 4, 6, and 7. All of the lectures will be free and open to the public.
The lectures mark the 76th anniversary of the series established at Oberlin in honor of Charles Beebe Martin, professor of classics and classical archaeology at the College from 1880 to 1925.
Titled "Masterpieces of Classical Metonymy," this year's series of lectures will address the relationships between words and objects in Classical, post-classical, and neo-classical literature.
"Metonomy refers to the poetic figure in which one object or image stands in for another," says Kirk Ormand, assistant professor of classics at Oberlin College. "Nagy's lectures at Oberlin will explore this theme by looking at the relationship between words and artistic objects in Classical poetry; at how ancient poets used poetry to represent the physical world, and how this influenced the way people viewed and interacted with the physical world. Nagy is one of very few scholars who works in an accessible way with linguistic theory and can talk about how it helps us to understand poetry and poetic composition."
Monday and Tuesday's lectures, "Music at the Festival: Plaiting the Garland, Weaving the Web, Forging the Shield" and "Art and its Attractions: Drawing the Outline, Painting the Picture, Shaping the Form," will take place at 8 p.m., in King 306. On Thursday, Nagy's lecture, "Beauty and its Delicate Creations: Disintegration and Reintegration," will take place at 8 p.m., in King 106. The final lecture of the series, "Mysteries of Fusion: Art to Nature and Back," will take place at 4:30 p.m., in King 106.
Nagy is currently the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. For the past three years, Nagy has served as director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, and was the Sather Classical Lecturer at the University of California Berkley for the 2001-2002 academic year. Nagy's special research interests include archaic Greek literature and oral poetics.
A graduate of Indiana University, Nagy received his Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard in 1966. The author of numerous books, Nagy's publications include The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter, Greek Mythology and Poetics, and Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past.
Media Contact: Sue Angell
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