Η Αθηνά, κατά την Ελληνική μυθολογία, ήταν η θεά της σοφίας, της στρατηγικής και του πολέμου. Παλαιότεροι τύποι του ονόματος της θεάς ήταν οι τύποι Ἀθάνα (δωρικός) και Ἀθήνη, το δε όνομα Ἀθηνᾶ, που τελικά επικράτησε, προέκυψε από το επίθετο Ἀθαναία, που συναιρέθηκε σε Ἀθηνάα > Ἀθηνᾶ. Στον πλατωνικό Κρατύλο το όνομα Αθηνά ετυμολογείται από το Α-θεο-νόα ή Η-θεο-νόα, δηλαδή η νόηση του Θεού (Κρατυλ. 407b), αλλά η εξήγηση αυτή είναι παρετυμολογική.
Discussing how I came into possession of a previously unpublished and brief history of the making of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, this essay explores the role intimacy plays in acquiring the printed matter that feeds black print culture studies scholarship. Traditionally, black print culture studies has focused on the circulation, distribution, or production of printed texts. Missing from these efforts is a consideration of how printed matter is acquired. I argue that by fostering intimacy, by engaging in "invisible trust-building work" with individuals who either possess, or can facilitate access to, unpublished ephemera, scholars invested in African American literary history can illuminate facets of this history yet unknown.
Friendship albums, blank volumes with decorative covers, emerged around 1825 as part of a growing market of women's print culture. Sentimentalism, the chief vocabulary of the friendship album genre, targeted white women consumers and largely ignored black women. However, freeborn African Americans rigorously engaged sentimental literature in the pages of the friendship album, recasting this artifact as a specimen of antebellum black print culture. This essay explores the production of African American friendship albums and examines artistic and literary contributions by freeborn black women writers.
Within the last four decades, selections from Anna Julia Cooper's most well-known work, A Voice from the South by A Black Woman of the South, have been reprinted in anthologies and collections over three dozen times. The prevalence and accessibility of her work in recent anthologies, scholarly editions, and reprints, however, obscures the arduous history that characterized Cooper's attempts to secure a public voice in print. In particular, Cooper's correspondences with W. E. B. Du Bois from 1923 to 1932 reveal the gendered power dynamics endemic in Cooper's attempts to secure adequate publication outlets for her work, while also establishing Cooper's activist approach to and expansive concept of black publishing through which she sought to keep the voices, accomplishments, lives and histories of working- class blacks and African American women centered in the larger public discourse. Attention to Cooper's larger oeuvre and the publication context for her various works contribute to an alternative literary history, one that more fully registers the innovative ways African American women writers have engaged the mechanism of publication and print cultures more generally.
In this essay I look at three canonical antebellum slave narratives from a book-historical perspective—the narratives of James Williams (1838), Frederick Douglass (1845), and Solomon Northup (1853)—to show that, despite similarities in terms of content, these works differed greatly in both formal and cultural terms. WhileNarrative of James Williams was published as a piece of anti-slavery propaganda and wholly embedded in abolitionist discourse, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was a much more personal literary endeavor, which involved Douglass himself as well as informal abolitionist networks. Released a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, in the context of the "Uncle Tom mania" of the early 1850s, Northup's Twelve Years a Slave was, to a large extent, a commercial venture that capitalized on the latest literary trend. Each of these three narratives, therefore, occupied a different space in antebellum print culture. By examining how these texts were published and circulated, I show that generalizations about antebellum slave narratives—slave narratives as bestsellers, as directed toward a Northern white audience, as a distinct genre recognizable by all—distort the complex history of this literary tradition. I argue that acknowledging the heterogeneous nature of what we usually perceive as a homogeneous whole gives us a better sense of how these texts might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War.
This essay examines Zilpha Elaw's Memoirs and her peripatetic theology as acts of resistance against British print culture. In 1827, Elaw began an itinerant Methodist ministry in Burlington County, New Jersey, and traveled extensively from Maine to Virginia. She moved to England in 1840, wrote and published her Memoirs, and continued her ministry into the 1860s. Elaw remarried in 1850, establishing a permanent home in London where she lived until her death in 1873. Both her written and her oral work were rejections of a British press that was overzealous in its depictions of American enslavement and its self-congratulatory representations of England as a bastion of free and enlightened civilization. The essay reads news articles, advertising, and ephemera in local papers of London and northern England as both a means of consumption of and knowledge production about American slavery. Elaw gets scripted by but writes her way out of those boundaries and redefines her own place in the print culture of nineteenth-century religious diaspora.
This essay reads the published proceedings of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee's 1872 meeting in New York,Slavery in Cuba, as a dense node of postbellum politics for black citizens in the United States. Recently liberated themselves, these individuals gathered to petition the federal government to support Cuba's anticolonial revolution and thereby end Cuban slavery. I locate this meeting in a broader, public debate over USAmerican foreign policy toward Cuba, including two 1870 meetings held in the same auditorium. Where these previous conventions frame the necessity of USAmerican intervention in the familiar language of the Monroe Doctrine, the CASC convention posits collaboration between Afro-descended communities in both the United States and Cuba as an alternative model of transamerican politics, rooted in empathy rather than paternalism. By hosting and documenting their convention in support of the Cubans, the Committee repurposed the social and print networks of antebellum anti-slavery movements in order to extend this project temporally and geographically. Through the processes of what I term autoarchiving, the CASC commanded its own narrative of the convention by creating, curating, and circulating a collection of writings about the meeting. Assembled in Slavery in Cuba, these transcriptions and news articles function as a durable, portable archive of the events themselves. Through these autoarchival practices, the CASC not only publicized how black citizens were exercising their newly acquired civil rights to question the dominant narrative of transamerican politics (the Monroe Doctrine) but also preserved this otherwise ephemeral moment of civic engagement in print.
This article investigates how early African American literature recirculates contemporary print culture in an effort to disrupt a conception of African American print culture as something limited to materials, processes, and products. Instead, I argue that African American print culture also exists in the imaginative space of literature as printed documents that are incorporated into the world of a narrative or kept at a distance through ekphrastic description. We must study representations of print culture in African American literature in order to recover a history of print's dual role as a medium that helped to circulate early African American writing while it enabled the transactions and publicized the practices of slavery. Pursuing this larger project through a single case, the recirculation and strategic elision of printed documents in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girldemonstrates the transformation of Jacobs's relationship to print. When former slaves recirculate texts associated with slavery in their personal narratives and fictional works, they transform their relationship to a medium that had previously insisted on their status as slaves. The writers' status as free subjects and their power in the public sphere is evident through the act of recirculation, which renders these texts as supplementary materials to their narratives of freedom.
Although Maria W. Stewart is primarily known as a lecturer, a journalist, and an abolitionist and women's rights activist, a recently recovered short story illuminates her contribution to early African American children's print culture. In 1861, the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art, a publication of the A.M.E. church that was edited by black men and designed for black readers, serialized Stewart's short story "The First Stage of Life" in the April, July, and October issues. This short story, published in the "Children's Room" section of the Repository, shows evidence that Stewart was a pioneer in creating literature for and about black children and indicted white authors and publishers for excluding black children from their publications. As with other African women writers in the nineteenth century, Stewart focused on the youthful experiences of black girls, often writing from their own experience. African American women writers delved into the interior lives of these youthful characters, showing their readers the thoughts, reasoning, and decision making processes of black girls as they weighed complex moral issues and considered the impact of their actions on numerous others. African American women writers distinguished between youthful and knowing girlhood. These clearly defined stages of development show that black girls deserved protection against cruel labor requirements or sexual victimization. The girls that these authors portrayed demonstrated physical endurance, resilience, and determination in the face of the most extreme circumstances. Stewart's "The First Stage of Life" reveals that black girls survived their circumstances with the aid of community members who nurtured them.
African American literary studies was built on the practice of archival recovery. In order to write about African American literature, critics had to (re)discover them. Today, in the wake of the field's institutionalization through the 1990s, it is typical to announce the significance of a recovered literary text based on canon-conserving knowledge. Intellectual legitimacy is presumed to be found in and distributed by the academic field formation. This essay explains why that presumption is a mistake, and it models how a different kind of recovery narrative might be told. Drawing from the archived papers of a defunct African American publisher, it considers the brief but intense reception of The Negotiations: A Novel of Tomorrow (1983). The book provided readers with an imaginative conduit through which they could speculate about black political culture that very year. Despite the publisher's best efforts, however, the book failed to cross over into the mainstream, remained in its expensive hardcover binding, and thereby eventually descended into obscurity. Undeterred by that narrative of failure, the essay argues that the true value of The Negotiations lies not with canonical legitimacy but in its historical "lostness"—the fact that it spoke to African American readers' experience of a moment when it seemed anything was possible. In order to reconstruct a meaningful sense of lostness, the critic should attend to the archive on its own rather than seek intellectual legitimacy from the academic field formation.
Απαντάται για πρώτη φορά στην Ιλιάδα (0-412) : ''...που με την ορμηνία της Αθηνάς κατέχει καλά την τέχνη του όλη...'' .. Η αρχική λοιπόν σημασία της λέξης δηλώνει την ΓΝΩΣΗ και την τέλεια ΚΑΤΟΧΗ οποιασδήποτε τέχνης. .. Κατά τον Ησύχιο σήμαινε την τέχνη των μουσικών και των ποιητών. Αργότερα,διευρύνθηκε η σημασία της και δήλωνε : την βαθύτερη κατανόηση των πραγμάτων και την υψηλού επιπέδου ικανότητα αντιμετώπισης και διευθέτησης των προβλημάτων της ζωής. .. Δεν είναι προ'ι'όν μάθησης αλλά γνώση πηγαία που αναβρύζει από την πνευματικότητα του κατόχου της. "ΣΟΦΟΣ Ο ΠΟΛΛΑ ΕΙΔΩΣ" λέει ο Πίνδαρος ..
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