Word: athenians
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Cucci's support for a Foucauldian system of bodily discipline is for the most part predicated on an invocation of the Athenian mind/body ideal. He quotes "the progressive thinker" John Dewey--neglecting to mention that what was progressive in the early part of this century is hardly progressive now--as follows: "there is an impossibility of achieving intelligence through any system that does not use the body to teach the mind and the mind to teach the body...
...against the predator beasts is preserved in myth and fairy tale. Typically, a mythical hero starts out by taking on the carnivorous monster that is ravaging the land: Perseus saves Andromeda from becoming a sea monster's snack. Theseus conquers the Minotaur who likes to munch on Athenian youth. Beowulf destroys the loathsome night-feeding Grendel. Heracles takes on a whole zoo of horrors: lions, hydras, boars. In European fairy tales it's the wolves you have to watch out for -- if the cannibal witches don't get you first...
...source of unalloyed aesthetic pleasure for those who do -- this show ought not to be missed. But neither should its second premise be taken seriously: the idea that there was some causal connection between the advent of the classical style in sculpture and that of democracy in Athenian politics. Both happened at roughly the same time: in the late 6th century an Athenian aristocrat, Kleisthenes, made an alliance with the people of Athens in order to defeat another noble, Isagoras, and pushed through a number of democratic reforms that were permanently enshrined in the Athenian constitution...
...BOTTOM LINE: Ariane Mnouchkine of France, one of the foremost stage auteurs, illumines Athenian tragedy...
...designed an intergalactic Gothic set in which to develop his complex vision. Placed in a world of darkness and asymmetries, Aeschylus' familiar characters are de-familiarized, distored and dissected. Athena, once the cool, collected goddess of wisdom, is transformed into a weary, indifferent hostess. The Athenian court of justice degenerates into a cocktail party where under-the-table arm-twisting subverts the Athenian ideal of justice. The furies are not beyond consoling themselves with booze, narcotics and yogurt, not is Orestes above Oedipal fantasies for the mother whome he has murdered...