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K-State Today

April 16, 2015

McCloskey to present lecture on literary, linguistic and cultural matters April 17

Submitted by Derek Hillard

Benjamin McCloskey, instructor in modern languages, will present a Modern Languages' Signatures Lecture on literary, linguistic and cultural matters at 3 p.m. Friday, April 17, in 301 Hale Library.

The title of the lecture is "Who is 'I'? Narrative Identity in Xenophon of Athens."

Today, the Greek writer Xenophon, who lived from 430-354 BC, is often condescended — even mocked — as embarrassingly incoherent as a Socratic, a liar and an idiot. After contextualizing Xenophon within the field of Classical Studies and within the literature of Greece, this talk will introduce the problem of Xenophon.​ McCloskey argues that the key to understanding Xenophon as coherent paradoxically lies in appreciating the incoherence of his corpus' many anonymous narrators on their own terms.