Books by Pramit Chaudhuri
Epic and tragedy, from Homer’s Achilles and Euripides’ Pentheus to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Milt... more Epic and tragedy, from Homer’s Achilles and Euripides’ Pentheus to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Milton’s Satan, are filled with characters challenging and warring against the gods. Nowhere is the theme of theomachy more frequently and powerfully represented, however, than in the poetry of early imperial Rome, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses at the beginning of the first century AD to Statius’ Thebaid near its end. This book—the first full-length study of human-divine conflict in Roman literature—asks why the war against god was so important to the poets of the time and how this understudied period of literary history influenced a larger tradition in Western literature.
Drawing on a variety of contexts—politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics—Pramit Chaudhuri argues for the fundamental importance of battles between humans and gods in representing the Roman world. A cast of tyrants, emperors, rebels, iconoclasts, philosophers, and ambitious poets brings to life some of the most extraordinary artistic products of classical antiquity. Based on close readings of the major extant epics and selected tragedies, the book replaces a traditionally Aeneid-centric view of imperial epic with a richer dialogue between Greek and Roman texts, contemporary authors, and diverse genres. The renewed sense of a tradition reveals how the conflicts these works represent constitute a distinctive theology informed by other discourses yet peculiar to epic and tragedy. Beginning with the Greek background and ending with a look ahead to developments in the Renaissance, this book charts the history of a theme that would find its richest expression in a time when men became gods and impiety threatened the very order of the world.
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This collection brings together leading experts in a number of fields of the humanities to offer ... more This collection brings together leading experts in a number of fields of the humanities to offer a new perspective on the classical tradition. Drawing on reception studies, philology and early modern studies, the essays explore the interaction between literary criticism and the multiple cultural contexts in which texts were produced, discovered, appropriated and translated. The intersection of Realpolitik and textual criticism, poetic and musical aesthetics, and authority and self-fashioning all come under scrutiny. The canonical Latin writers and their subsequent reception form the backbone of the volume, with a focus on the European Renaissance. It thus marks a reconnection between classical and early modern studies and the concomitant rapprochement of philological and cultural historical approaches to texts and other works of art. This book will be of interest to scholars in classics, Renaissance studies, comparative literature, English, Italian and art history.
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Articles by Pramit Chaudhuri
This article examines a case study in Silius Italicus’ Punica using two distinct but complementar... more This article examines a case study in Silius Italicus’ Punica using two distinct but complementary approaches to Flavian epic intertextuality: a methodological move to expand and further incorporate computational tools within philology, and a literary theoretical move to combine intertextuality and thematic interpretation. The case study focuses on the debates in the Carthaginian senate described in Punica 2 and 11, both of which Silius adapts from similar scenes in Livy while also drawing on Vergil’s Aeneid. Part 1 of the essay introduces a new tool for finding a range of inexact verbal parallels based on a bioinformatics technique known as sequence alignment. After comparing the method with two other computational tools, Diogenes and Tesserae, we assess our tool’s ability to detect intertexts in the Punica already noted in traditional scholarship. We then analyse a series of computationally identified parallels that have not been commented on previously and find that all three tools can reveal morphologically and syntactically similar phrases of apparent literary interest. Part 2 focuses on a feature of Silius’ triangulation of Livy and Vergil, the characterisation of the Carthaginian senator Hanno. Through allusions to Vergil’s Drances, Silius turns Hanno from a shrewd judge of Roman character and strength, as he appears in Livy, into a far more ambivalent, Quisling-like figure. Moreover, the effect of blending the two sources is to make more porous the distinctions between nationalities and other categories that structure the reader’s response to Hanno and to the Punica as a whole. In concluding, we suggest that the context in which these literary interactions take place - diplomacy and debate - itself figures the kind of negotiation taking place at a textual level between the various works and their worldviews. The conclusion unifies the methodological and theoretical parts of the essay under the rubric of “triangulation”, in part by drawing on the application of the term in the philosophy of Donald Davidson.
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Reviews by Pramit Chaudhuri
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Media by Pramit Chaudhuri
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Society for Classical Studies Panels by Pramit Chaudhuri
The new Society for Early Modern Classical Reception (SEMCR) invites proposals for papers to be d... more The new Society for Early Modern Classical Reception (SEMCR) invites proposals for papers to be delivered at the 2017 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Toronto. For its second panel, SEMCR invites abstracts on the reception of classical texts in early modern political thought. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes called ancient books a " Venime " akin " to the biting of a mad Dogge, " which had the power to corrupt their readers and bring down monarchies. Hobbes' violent reaction captures the authority Greek and Roman political thought commanded in a period of radical change in systems of government and, concomitantly, in contemporary theorizing about politics. Early modern readers absorbed Plautus, Plutarch, and rhetorical handbooks along with the authors central to later modern formations of the classical canon like Homer and Cicero. These texts helped give shape to new debates over legitimacy, authority, virtue, community, and a host of other vital issues. This panel invites papers that illuminate the historical impact of that reception or make a methodological contribution to the study of the reception of political thought in particular. Following recent developments in the field, it welcomes studies of poetry and other media as well as canonical prose texts (e. The study of classical political reception is an emergent field in the context of the SCS, and the panel specially invites scholars new to this area to submit abstracts. We are committed to creating a congenial and collaborative forum for the infusion of new ideas into classics, and hence welcome abstracts that are exploratory in nature as well as abstracts of latter-stage research. Proposals may address (but are not limited to) the following questions: What distinctive contribution can classicists make to the history of political thought? How do less well-known texts (e.g., neo-Latin epic, legal texts) affect current conventional interpretations of the history of political thought? How do early modern thinkers understand temporality? What role does genre play in the transmission and transformation of early modern thinkers' engagement with classical thought? Recent work by Quentin Skinner and others has refocused scholarly attention on the connections between poetry and political theory. How can classicists best contribute to this line of research? Abstracts of no more than 450 words, suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation, should be sent as an email attachment to pramit.chaudhuri@dartmouth.edu. All persons who submit abstracts must be SCS members in good standing. The abstracts will be judged anonymously: please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page. Proposals must be received by March 1, 2016.
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Renaissance Society of America Panels by Pramit Chaudhuri
Renaissance Europe sought to define itself in relation to multiple models, prominent among which ... more Renaissance Europe sought to define itself in relation to multiple models, prominent among which were ancient Greco-Roman culture and contemporary non-Christian (as well as Christian heterodox) cultures. The Humanist emulation of classical ideals in text and image occurred within a larger context of religious, ethnic, and frequently military interactions: the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, harassment from North African Corsairs, mass migrations of Jews, and internecine tensions resulting from the Protestant Reformation. The " classical " provided a discourse through which scholars and artists could negotiate a religious, national, or pan-European identity transhistorical in scope yet ultimately presentist in defining " the other ". This panel seeks to explore the function of the classical and classicism across these identities in both textual and material sources.
Abstracts of no more than 150 words and a short CV should be sent as separate email attachments to pramit.chaudhuri@austin.utexas.edu (please see RSA guidelines for abstracts and CVs ). Abstracts will be judged anonymously, so please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page.
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Papers by Pramit Chaudhuri
Dictionnaire du images poétiques
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Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations, 2019
Computational stylometry has become an increasingly important aspect of literary criticism , but ... more Computational stylometry has become an increasingly important aspect of literary criticism , but many humanists lack the technical expertise or language-specific NLP resources required to exploit computational methods. We demonstrate a stylometry toolkit for analysis of Latin literary texts, which is freely available at www.qcrit.org/stylometry. Our toolkit generates data for a diverse range of literary features and has an intuitive point-and-click interface. The features included have proven effective for multiple literary studies and are calculated using custom heuris-tics without the need for syntactic parsing. As such, the toolkit models one approach to the user-friendly generation of stylometric data, which could be extended to other premod-ern and non-English languages underserved by standard NLP resources.
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Books by Pramit Chaudhuri
Drawing on a variety of contexts—politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics—Pramit Chaudhuri argues for the fundamental importance of battles between humans and gods in representing the Roman world. A cast of tyrants, emperors, rebels, iconoclasts, philosophers, and ambitious poets brings to life some of the most extraordinary artistic products of classical antiquity. Based on close readings of the major extant epics and selected tragedies, the book replaces a traditionally Aeneid-centric view of imperial epic with a richer dialogue between Greek and Roman texts, contemporary authors, and diverse genres. The renewed sense of a tradition reveals how the conflicts these works represent constitute a distinctive theology informed by other discourses yet peculiar to epic and tragedy. Beginning with the Greek background and ending with a look ahead to developments in the Renaissance, this book charts the history of a theme that would find its richest expression in a time when men became gods and impiety threatened the very order of the world.
Articles by Pramit Chaudhuri
Reviews by Pramit Chaudhuri
Media by Pramit Chaudhuri
Society for Classical Studies Panels by Pramit Chaudhuri
Renaissance Society of America Panels by Pramit Chaudhuri
Abstracts of no more than 150 words and a short CV should be sent as separate email attachments to pramit.chaudhuri@austin.utexas.edu (please see RSA guidelines for abstracts and CVs ). Abstracts will be judged anonymously, so please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page.
Papers by Pramit Chaudhuri
Drawing on a variety of contexts—politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics—Pramit Chaudhuri argues for the fundamental importance of battles between humans and gods in representing the Roman world. A cast of tyrants, emperors, rebels, iconoclasts, philosophers, and ambitious poets brings to life some of the most extraordinary artistic products of classical antiquity. Based on close readings of the major extant epics and selected tragedies, the book replaces a traditionally Aeneid-centric view of imperial epic with a richer dialogue between Greek and Roman texts, contemporary authors, and diverse genres. The renewed sense of a tradition reveals how the conflicts these works represent constitute a distinctive theology informed by other discourses yet peculiar to epic and tragedy. Beginning with the Greek background and ending with a look ahead to developments in the Renaissance, this book charts the history of a theme that would find its richest expression in a time when men became gods and impiety threatened the very order of the world.
Abstracts of no more than 150 words and a short CV should be sent as separate email attachments to pramit.chaudhuri@austin.utexas.edu (please see RSA guidelines for abstracts and CVs ). Abstracts will be judged anonymously, so please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page.