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Elgin Marbles controversy heats up with opening of Acropolis museum

June 26th, 2009 admin No comments
The New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece

The New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece

Britain and Greece have marked their roughly two hundred-year stalemate surrounding the ownership of the Elgin Marbles with a new salvo. The occassion: the June 20 opening of the new $200 million, 260,000 square foot Acropolis Museum in Athens. The museum’s opening can be seen as a rebuttal to claims by the British Museum, which holds more than half of the frieze’s total length, that Greece did not have a sufficient space to keep them. Indeed, Claire Soares of  The Independent sees this massive undertaking as a very deliberate demonstration of Greece’s ability to keep the frieze safe:  “Unlike any other museum in the world, it was designed to house something it didn’t own.”

The gaps in the Greek collection are completed with plaster casts of the originals, made to look by some reports conspicuous in their artificiality. As Sean Newsom of The Times of London argued recently , “We can argue all we like about how we saved the sculpture from years of turmoil in Greece, but with this room finally completed, it’s obvious where they now belong.”

Though no permanent loan requests or bequeathals seem to be in the offing, Greek officials have taken on a triumphal tone. The inevitable, it seems, has finally come, according to Greek Culture Minister Antonio Samaras: “For 200 years, the Parthenon Marbles have been amputated, now they must be reunited. The Parthenon frieze speaks through its totality; this voice should be heard not be silenced,”

Numerous other commentators have chimed in on Greece’s behalf–among them Christopher Hitchens and Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times. Compare these with responses from the Romantic period by Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, among others. The striking thing, even with the opening of the new museum, is how little the debate has changed.

The holdings of the Parthenon Frieze at the Acropolis Museum. Currently, the British Museum holds more of the friezed than does the Acropolis museum

The holdings of the Parthenon Frieze at the Acropolis Museum. Currently, the British Museum holds roughly 60 percent of the total length compared to the Acropolis Museum's 40 percent

Categories: News Tags: , , , , ,

CFP: No Place Like Home: Localism and Regionalism in British Literature and Culture, 1660-1830

June 3rd, 2009 admin No comments

Recent literary studies have generally assumed that regionalism emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century in response to the consolidation of the modern nation-state, imperial expansion, and industrialization, all of which tended to efface cultural, and to some extent geographical, differences among sub-national communities. Yet during the long eighteenth century, various literary and cultural developments—from newspapers, novels, dictionaries, and poems, to antiquarianism, topography, travel writings, and statistical surveys— reflected, and arguably participated in creating, local and regional forms of community. No Place Like Home will explore the idea that regionalism and localism— or, more generally, the aesthetic expressions of sub-national cultural, political, or geographic identities —may have preceded, or at least accompanied, the rise of the nation-state. Our proposed collection aims to challenge “rise of the nation” narratives by exploring forms of regional and local affiliation in British literature and culture in the 150 years preceding the nation-state’s emergence as the paradigmatic form of community in Western Europe. We are therefore soliciting contributions that investigate any of the following topics as they relate to British literature and culture between 1660 and 1830:

– the emergence of regionalism as an aesthetic, cultural, and/ or political category
– the development of the concept of the local (especially in contradistinction to the competing claims of the national and the global or cosmopolitan)
– the evolution of discourses of “rootedness,” “aboriginality” or other forms of sub-national belonging, identification, or community

Please send 500-word abstracts for essays of 5,000 to 7,000 words, along with brief academic CVs, to Evan Gottlieb (evan.gottlieb[at]oregonstate.edu) and Juliet Shields (js37[at]u.washington.edu) by September 1, 2009 .

Categories: Call For Papers Tags: , , , , , ,