It is often said that the poet Homer "educated" ancient Greece. Joseph J. Foy and Timothy M. Dale have assembled a team of notable scholars who argue, quite persuasively, that Homer Simpson and his ilk are educating America and offering insights into the social order and the human condition. Following Homer Simpson Goes to Washington (winner of the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook or Primer on American and Popular Culture) and Homer Simpson Marches on Washington, this exceptional volume reveals how books like J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, movies like Avatar and Star Wars, and television shows like The Office and Firefly define Americans' perceptions of society. The authors expand the discussion to explore the ways in which political theories play out in popular culture. Homer Simpson Ponders Politics includes a foreword by fantasy author Margaret Weis (coauthor/creator of the Dragonlance novels and game world) and is divided according to eras and themes in political thought: The first section explores civic virtue, applying the work of Plato and Aristotle to modern media. Part 2 draws on the philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Smith as a framework for understanding the role of the state. Part 3 explores the work of theorists such as Kant and Marx, and the final section investigates the ways in which movies and newer forms of electronic media either support or challenge the underlying assumptions of the democratic order. The result is an engaging read for undergraduate students as well as anyone interested in popular culture.
Facing censorship and being confined to the fringes of the political debate of his time, Thomas Hobbes turned his attention to translating Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek into English. Many have not considered enough the usefulness of these translations. In this book, Andrea Catanzaro analyses the political value of Hobbes’ translations of Homer’s works and exposes the existence of a link between the translations and the previous works of the Malmesbury philosopher. In doing so, he asks: • What new information concerning Hobbes' political and philosophical thought can be rendered from mere translation? • What new offerings can a man in his eighties at the time offer, having widely explained his political ideas in numerous famous essays and treatises? • What new elements can be deduced in a text that was well-known in England and where there were better versions than the ones produced by Hobbes? Andrea Catanzaro’s commentary and theoretical interpretation offers an incentive to study Hobbes lesser known works in the wider development of Western political philosophy and the history of political thought.
"In this first full-length treatment of the Iliad as a work of political thought, Hammer demonstrates how Homer's epic is also an ancient Greek discussion on political ethics. Hammer redefines political thought as the activity of addressing issues of collective identity and organization. Using this understanding of politics, he discusses how the characters in the Iliad, through their larger-than-life actions and interactions, embody community issues of authority, conflict, judgment, and the interrelationship between personal and collective identity. The characters' many quarrels, laments, reconciliations, and vows of loyalty and friendship all critically model the principles and controversies of underlying Greek political ethics of communal responsibility and relationship."--BOOK JACKET.
Including the works of more than thirty authors, this edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes the origin of human society and law; the nature of justice and good government; the distribution of power among genders and social classes.