Reception and National Traditions

In 1781 the French engraver Noël Le Mire designed and produced a print of George Washington modeled on a 1779 painting by Jean Baptiste Le Paon now believed lost (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91720123).

This paper assesses the reception of Greek epic and tragedy within the literature of the diasporic Vietnamese community. Previous scholarship at the intersection of Vietnamese studies and classical reception has focused on the Vietnam War through a largely American-centric perspective. Works such as Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam and its sequel Odysseus in America, use classical allusions as tools with which to better understand the experiences of the American soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War.

The first Gothic novel in American literature, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), describes a case of sinister ventriloquism. In this work, a German immigrant community in rural Pennsylvania comes to tragic ruin when a mysterious outsider, the “biloquist” Carwin, begins impersonating voices and terrorizing the townspeople. While the fantastic plot revolves around the machinations of a single impersonator, other more pervasive kinds of cultural ventriloquism underlie the narrative.

In this talk I investigate the motivations for learning ancient Greek of a group of Venezuelan intellectuals during a period of continuous economic instability and civil unrest that has lasted more than 30 years. The group was composed of philosophers, scientists, and historians, as well as poets and artists. The leader of the group was J.M. Briceño Guerrero, a prolific Venezuelan philosopher and classical philologist. Briceño died in 2014 and the group finally disbanded, with many members emigrating to other countries for different reasons.

Le Théâtre de Neptune is the earliest surviving theatrical piece written anywhere in North America, north of Mexico (Jones). Significantly, it owes its introduction and central theme to Iliad 15 and Homer’s narrative of the tripartite division of the cosmos. This paper explores why the play’s author, Marc Lescarbot, a Parisian lawyer and temporary immigrant, chose this Homeric story, when he wrote his piece in 1606.