My project involves a close reading of selections of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid in Latin, complemented by research of scholarly literature on the work, culminating in an extended essay which will serve as my senior thesis. In particular, my research focuses on how the past, present and future are interconnected and reference one another in the Aeneid. The post-Iliadic narrative follows a Trojan refugee as he seeks to found a new city in Italy, which will become the legendary predecessor to Rome, and follows the story of the national mytho-historical past familiar to all Romans. The Aeneid not only succeeds the Trojan War, and thus the Iliad, in the mythic chronology, it is the literary descendent of Homeric epic and became itself a highly influential member of the Western canon. Divine influence, fate, human will and prophecy all contribute to the complex depiction of time. My research thus far has led me to analyze characters in the Aeneid as having temporal aspects to their identities that influence how they interact with one another.

Publius Ovidius Naso, better known as Ovid, was a prominent Roman elegiac poet writing in the late 1st century BC during the early Empire under the first emperor, Augustus. Of his many literary accomplishments, which extend from love poetry to the Metamorphoses, his great epic work, the Fasti has often been overlooked as an important literary source. Like the various fasti used in Rome as official calendars and records, Ovid’s Fasti takes the reader through the first six months of the year, one month per book, marking out appropriate days for business and legal affairs as well as holidays, all while elucidating the origins of important Roman festivals, traditions, and astronomical phenomena through elaborate descriptions and stories. It also offers a unique look into Augustan ideology and provides an example of the ambiguity between propagandistic and subversive writing that was characteristic of many Roman authors during this period. Through critical analysis of the Latin and extensive research into Roman culture and religious practices of Ovid’s time, the focus of this research has been on the representation and manifestation of conflict and violence in the Fasti. Issues concerning the nature of sacrifice, war, and revenge arise in each book, alluding to general tensions felt in Augustan Rome. But their consistently negative portrayals reveal Ovid’s own strong criticism about the prominence and celebration of violence under the both peaceful and martial Augustus.

Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka writes that Yoruba narratives share elements with early Greek narratives but differ from Greek literature in their conceptions of divine authority. While Yoruba deities, who like Greek tragic heroes are beset with fatal flaws, must atone for these flaws through moral retribution, Soyinka argues Greek deities have no conception of moral responsibility, fearing only the threat of retribution from divinities more powerful than themselves. My research presents an alternate view, that the corollary within traditional Yoruba culture to Greek and later Roman Classical cultures is not a correspondence of gods to gods, but of gods to deified men. While in Yoruba culture gods undergo a process of death and rebirth, described by Jung as individuation, Classical Western heroes are often human beings claiming either divine parentage or divine authority. Though they claim their power and destiny from the gods, these heroes are not themselves gods, though many do undergo post-mortem apotheosis and are thereafter included in the Greek or Roman pantheon. Soyinka argues that, because Jung distinguishes between “primitive” (i.e. African) and “civilized” (i.e. Greek and Roman) cultures, Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious is undermined. I posit that the process of individuation is present and that the themes of death and rebirth are common to Yoruba and both Greek and Roman cultures. By contrasting two iconic figures, Vergil’s Aeneas, the mythological founder of Rome, and Obotunde Ijimere’s Obtala, the Yoruba creator of man, my analysis will highlight how understanding these mythologies, Greek/Roman and Yoruba, and the points at which they intersect and diverge, will provide insights into how the hero mythologies of these two cultures have universal themes, allowing audiences of divergent heritages to appreciate their respective rich literary traditions.

In this paper I argue that the Classics field regulates the production of knowledge based on paradigms of scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is accomplished by defining the practice of scholarship and accepting or rejecting the work of scholars in accordance with these paradigms. I will use the fierce debate provoked by the publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization to demonstrate this process. Bernal’s argument is that Egyptian and Phoenician colonization and influence shaped Ancient Greek culture. Critics of Bernal’s work conflate him with the Afrocentrist movement, a reaction to Eurocentrism and racism in scholarship, which advocates the study of history from an African perspective. Classics’ visceral response to Bernal and Afrocentrism speaks to what is at stake in the debate: our understanding of the origins of western civilization. To document the themes which have characterized this debate I examined the scholarly writing involved. Bernal and the Afrocentrists challenge the current paradigms of scholarship: the ideas of objectivity and proof and the Eurocentrism inherent in the Classics field. Classicists tie the issue of race to the issue of objectivity, which complicates the debate. Their fundamental paradigmatic difference causes classicists to attempt to exclude Bernal and the Afrocentrists from knowledge production and declare their scholarship invalid.

When speaking of race, the task put to Asian American poets is not to make readers comprehend that they are different, but rather how. The question of how racial difference can be understood is really a question of literary form, and one which Asian American poets take up with great frequency. But when reading Asian American poets, the institutional tendency has been to interpret them in terms of literary criticism’s more material interventions, i.e. readings which focus on existent racial conflict, class conflict, or gendered conflict. Within the field of literary studies, the partitioning of institutionalized reading practices generally occurs along racial lines, with formalist analysis being used to understand white writers and cultural criticism being reserved for racialized writers; I argue that this limits the recognition of the racialized writer’s transformative possibilities by ignoring the specifically literary freedom to imagine otherwise. I do not contend that literary form is the transcendent means to enter a universal space, but rather that form is deeply enmeshed within material systems and yet provides the means of altering their parameters. With these methodological considerations in mind, I have refocused on the poetry of Arthur Sze, because speaking about criticism is empty without offering an interpretation. There I have found that his formal decisions allow us to conceive of the possibility of a universality of difference, rather than one which homogenizes toward unification.

The Northern Min dialects of Chinese have been known since the 70's to display irregular phonological correspondences to the rest of the Chinese dialects.  In particular, consonants in certain classes of words have undergone lenition or weakening, and those classes of words have also undergone irregular tonal development.  Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for these anomalies.  The most intriguing hypothesis, put forth by Jerry Norman, is that these reflect another set of consonants at the proto-Min level.  He later proposed that these consonants were phonetically prenasalized, on the basis of certain words thought to be of Mien origin.  We will attempt to show that these consonants were in fact some sort of glottalized consonants, based on evidence from Kra-Dai loanwords, Mien loanwords and tonal evidence.  We argue that the development of glottalized consonants at the proto-Min level was similar to the development of glottalized consonants under 'minority influences' in several modern Chinese dialects.  We also discuss the implications of these loanwords in terms of Southeast China's ancient linguistic and cultural history.