No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
Martial offers not only an anatomy of Roman sexuality but an ideology of it.
J. P. Sullivan, Martial: The Unexpected Classic
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.
T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction
John Sullivan's last public engagement was to deliver a paper at the third USC-UCLA Seminar in Roman Studies on St. Patrick's day 1993. The subject of the seminar was ‘Literature and Ideology’, and featured Tom Habinek (USC), Carole Newlands (UCLA), myself as moderator, and John himself, who was to speak on ‘Martial and Flavian Ideology’. John's deteriorating condition prevented him from attending the seminar and a timely replacement was found in the person of a fellow ‘Patrician’, Patrick Sinclair of UC Irvine. The seminar was crowded with John's southern Californian friends and colleagues, and the three and a half hours of lively, rigorous, intellectually tough but friendly discourse were very much in the spirit of the missing speaker, whose absence was incontrovertibly the defining presence. I approached the speakers later with the idea of a Festschrift for John, built upon the theme of the seminar and containing revised versions of their own papers. They warmly agreed. Such is the germination of this volume. To those initial three papers have been added two papers (those of Malamud and Winkler) from the Pacific Rim Roman Literature seminar organised by Frederick Ahl in honour of John at Cornell in August 1993, five specially commissioned pieces from other friends and literary colleagues, and the text of the first J.P. Sullivan Annual Lecture in Classics held at UCSB in March 1994. The aim has been to treat a topic which was becoming central to John Sullivan's own inquiries and to produce a volume with more intellectual and critical cohesion than is often the case with honorific collections. I wanted the result to be as worthy as is possible of the man and the values he embodied in work and life.
- Type
- Introduction
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Aureal Publications 1994
References
1. Eagleton, T., Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York 1991Google Scholar), If. Similar observations abound: see, e.g., Rossi-Landi, F., Ideologic (Milano 1978), 15–37Google Scholar, where eleven main meanings are discussed. The term was invented in the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the first volume of whose Projets d’éléments d’idéologie à l’usage des écoles centrales de la République appeared in 1801. I am deeply indebted to the whole of Eagleton’s discussion, ‘What is Ideology?’, 1–31, in this paragraph.
2. Thompson, J.B., Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge 1984), 4Google Scholar, quoted by Eagleton (n.1 above), 5.
3. Althusser, L., Pour Marx (Paris 1965, repr. 1977), 240Google Scholar: ‘Le rapport “vécu” des hommes au monde, y compris à l’Histoire (dans l’action ou l’inaction politique), passe par l’idéologie, bien mieux, est I’idéologie elle-même.’ Althusser also speaks more conventionally of une idéologie as une système de représentations (238). Both the representational system and the ‘lived relation’ are ‘unconscious’ (inconscieni).
4. Lloyd, G.E.R., Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge 1983), 1Google Scholar. Lloyd’s use of the term also includes the ideas or beliefs ‘that corresponded to the views or ideals of the ruling elite’.