“Above all Greek, above all Roman Fame”: Classical Rhetoric in America during the Colonial and Early National Periods

The broad and profound influence of classical rhetoric in early America can be observed in both the academic study of that ancient discipline, and in the practical approaches to persuasion adopted by orators and writers in the colonial period, and during the early republic. Classical theoretical treatises on rhetoric enjoyed wide authority both in college curricula and in popular treatments of the art. Classical orators were imitated as models of republican virtue and oratorical style. Indeed, virtually every dimension of the political life of early Ameria bears the imprint of a classical conception of public discourse. This essay marks the various specific aspects of the reception and influence of the classical rhetorical tradition in the learning, speaking and writing of Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Greek love, orientalism and race : intersections in Classical reception

Classics has been characterised as both a radical and a conservative discipline. Classical reception studies has enjoyed exploring this paradox: antiquity has provided an erotic example for modern homosexual counter-culture as well as a model for running exploitative empires. This article brings these aspects of reception studies together, to examine how the Victorian homosexual reception of the ancient Greeks was framed and worked out in a particular imperial context at the end of the nineteenth century

Introduction: preliminary reflections on the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu

Book synopsis: Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu’s oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis

Quantum authentication with unitary coding sets

A general class of authentication schemes for arbitrary quantum messages is proposed. The class is based on the use of sets of unitary quantum operations in both transmission and reception, and on appending a quantum tag to the quantum message used in transmission. The previous secret between partners required for any authentication is a classical key. We obtain the minimal requirements on the unitary operations that lead to a probability of failure of the scheme less than one. This failure may be caused by someone performing a unitary operation on the message in the channel between the communicating partners, or by a potential forger impersonating the transmitter.Comment: RevTeX4, 10 page

Atena e l’ottovolante: “affective turn”, estetica postmoderna e ricezione dell’antico

PublishedArticleThe author investigates in this article the forms of Classical reception, in particular in reference to the visual and performing arts and with a special focus on the role of Classical Antiquity in postmodern aesthetics. After presenting, in a first part, a model relating Classical reception to transcultural dynamics, the author presents the most substantial changes in the forms of reception in postmodernism and finally introduces a current research project which investigates, along the theoretical lines presented in the first sections, the representations of the ancient world in theme parks

Pilot-aided ML schemes for joint beamforming and channel estimation in WCDMA systems

This paper proposes semi-blind channel estimation and interference cancellation schemes for the reception of pilot-aided signals in WCDMA systems. It is shown that the performance of classical training-based schemes is severely degraded due to the code-multiplexing (as opposed to time-multiplexing) of traffic and pilot signals. The time-dispersivity of the channel destroys the orthogonality between the traffic signal and the pilot, and consequently the traffic signal appears as a new interfering signal for the channel estimation/beamforming algorithm. In order to avoid this effect, we propose techniques that exploit both the presence of the training sequence and the structure of the traffic signal in a semi-blind fashion.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Cultural Memory and Survival: The Russian Renaissance of Classical Antiquity in the Twentieth Century

In this first publication of the UCL SSEES Inaugural Lecture Series, Pamela Davidson dedicates her professorial lecture to the memory of two "outstanding Russian scholars and remarkable individuals, whose contribution to our understanding of classical antiquity and Russian literature has been immense: Sergei Averintsev (1937-2004) and Mikhail Gasparov (1935-2005)." Professor Davidson's survey falls into three parts. She looks back and examines what classical antiquity meant for Russians in the period leading up to the revolution know as the Silver Age; in the second part, she considers what happened to the legacy of this interest in Soviet times; and finally, she comments on the present situation. In doing so, Professor Davidson hopes to demonstrate that the reception of classical antiquity has been marked by, and is even the source of some surprising continuities. Pamela Davidson is Professor of Russian Literature at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies