Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece

Front Cover
Cornell University Press, May 31, 2018 - Literary Criticism - 240 pages

First published in French in 1988, this extraordinary book traces the meaning and function of reading from its very beginnings in Greek oral culture through the development of silent reading.

One of the most haunting early examples of Greek alphabetical writing appears on the life-sized Archaic funerary statue of a young girl. The inscription speaks for Phrasikleia, who "shall always be called maiden," for she has received this name from the gods instead of marriage.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
From Silence to Sound
8
The SpeechAct in the Earliest Greek Inscriptions
26
The Instrumental Status of Reading Aloud
44
The Inscription of the Proper Name
64
Kallirhoe and the Thirty Suitors
80
The Reading Voice and the Law
109
Lycurgus Numa and the Tattooed Corpse of Epimenides
123
Sappho the Poem and the Reader
145
On the Invention of Silent Reading
160
The Pederastic Paradigm of Writing
187

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