Theognis

By Gregory Nagy

Text and reperformance: do you really need a text for your reperformance?

posted 2021.06.24, to be reperformed 2021.06.30 | By Gregory Nagy §0. This presentation offers friendly criticism of the views of classicists who use such terms as "text" and "reperformance" without fully taking into account various comparative perspectives that have for some time been made available by way of typological descriptions of "live" performance as observed and analyzed in a wide variety of ethnographical studies. Read more

By Gregory Nagy

On the idea of dead poets as imagined by T. S. Eliot, compared with ideas about reperformance, Part III

2021.04.30 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In Part III of this essay, continuing from Part I (Nagy 2021.04.17, linked here) and Part II (Nagy 2021.04.24, linked here), I return for the third and last time to what T. S. Eliot said (1919 [1975]:38) about the poet he was in his youth—and about any aspiring poet in general: “the most individual parts of his work,” he said, “may be those in… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

On the idea of dead poets as imagined by T. S. Eliot, compared with ideas about reperformance, Part I

2021.04.17 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In an essay first published in the year 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot made a bold statement about poets, dead or alive. Back then, he was thinking not only about the “individual talent” of young poets like himself but also about the collective legacy of all “dead poets” stemming from the “European tradition,” as he thought of it, starting with… Read more