Another installment in my long-term project to make available copies of old chapters and articles, when I have a spare moment. This one is prompted by another exchange with Will Pooley at Bristol, who asked on the Twitter about modern historians using the dialogue form, whether invented or found. My immediate thought was Keith Hopkins’ A World Full Of Gods, which (if you don’t know it) experiments with a variety of unexpected literary forms to capture different aspects of religions in the ancient world and the numerous historiographical issues involved in trying to study and represent them. As I think I’ve remarked on here before, I’m not convinced that many of Hopkins’ experiments actually work properly – the professional exponents of science fiction do time travel stories rather better, for example – but it’s amazing that it was done at all, and a great shame that this aspect was largely passed over by reviewers as quickly as possible with an air of great embarrassment. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Keith Hopkins’
Rome: Open City? (Reprint Project)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged historiography, Keith Hopkins, migration, rhetoric on February 24, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Art and Artlessness (Reprint Project)
Posted in Publications, tagged economic history, historiography, Keith Hopkins, rhetoric, Richard Duncan-Jones on January 26, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Personally Speaking
Posted in Musings, tagged academic writing, blogging, Keith Hopkins, personal voice, style, Tony Keen on October 11, 2014| 13 Comments »
Given that they possess astonishingly super-sensitive, multi-directional hearing, as detailed in a series of television programmes this week, you might think that the sodding cats would hear that it is pouring with rain this morning, and so go back to sleep for a bit rather than prodding me at 5 am until I get up and open the catflap so that they can poke their noses outside, stomp around angrily for half an hour because it’s raining and I’m refusing to do anything about it, and then go back to bed. I find it more or less impossible to go back to sleep once I’m awake, whatever ghastly hour of the morning it may be, and so I’ve already had two cups of tea, caught up on Twitter, cleaned up the kitchen after yesterday’s brewing session and transferred the experimental Blackcurrant Stout into the fermenting bin before sitting down to contemplate Tony Keen’s fascinating piece yesterday on the personal voice in classical blogging.
Okay, quick readers’ poll: did your reaction to the previous paragraph tend more towards “for goodness’ sake stop wittering and talk about something with a bit of substance” or towards “please tell us more of the home life of a professor of ancient history and his cats”? (more…)
Sphinx 