An analysis of ancient Greek and Roman works alongside contemporary literature, exploring how these classics shape our understanding of the politics of time in America
Throughout American history, ancient Greek and Roman cultures have been privileged as authoritatively timeless. During crises in American history, political and cultural leaders have promoted national unity to homogenize disparate experiences of these crises, to offer relief, and to reestablish trust in the status quo. Analyzing texts that draw on ancient Greek and Roman material to respond to these crises, Sasha-Mae Eccleston explains how contemporary authors and artists have questioned calls for unity that ignore inequality. Their engagements with the temporalities of ancient material reveal how time structures membership in the national community.
Reading, for example, Seneca's drama Medea, Homer's epics, and the verses of Ovid and Sappho alongside Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones or the poetry of Ocean Vuong and Juliana Spahr, Eccleston explores major events in American sociopolitical life. Epic Events shows how ancient texts that seem to insulate audiences from disaster can actually alert them to the frightening hierarchization of life in the United States. Eccleston skillfully weaves together analyses of texts ranging from memorials, visual art, and contemporary literature to speeches and public health declarations to bring questions of race, class, and gender into dialogue with time in thoughtful, nuanced, and original ways.
