A new “Romen” Empire : Toni Morrison's love and the classics

An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction

Transforming America : Toni Morrison and classical tradition

This thesis examines a significant but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's work: her ambivalent engagement with classical tradition. Analysing all eight novels. it argues that her allusiveness to the cultural practices of Ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her political project. Illuminating hegemonic America's consistent recourse to the classical world in the construction of its identity, I expand on prior scholarship by reading Morrison's own revisionary classicism as a subversion of dominant US culture. My three-part study examines the way her deployment of Graeco-Roman tradition destabilizes mythologies of the American Dream, prevailing narratives of America's history, and national ideologies of purity. Part I shows that Morrison enlists tragic conventions to problematize the Dream's central tenets of upward mobility, progress and freedom. It argues that while her engagement with Greek choric models effects her refutation of individualism, it is her later novels' rejection of a wholly catastrophic vision that enables her to avoid reinscribing the Dream. Part II demonstrates that it is through her classical allusiveness that Morrison rewrites American history. Her multiply-resonant echoes of the epic, pastoral and tragic traditions that have consistently informed the dominant culture's justifications for and representations of its actions enable her reconfiguration of colonization, of the foundation of the new nation, of slavery and its aftermath and of the Civil Rights Movement. Part III illuminates how the author uses the discourse of pollution or miasma to challenge Enlightenment-derived valorizations of racial purity and to expose the practices of scapegoating and revenge as flawed means to moral purity. Her interest in the hegemonic fabrication of classical tradition as itself a pure and purifying force is matched by her insistence on that tradition's African elements, and thus on its potent impurity. Her own radical classicism, therefore, is central to the transformation of America that her novels envision

Transforming America : Toni Morrison and classical tradition

This thesis examines a significant but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's work: her ambivalent engagement with classical tradition. Analysing all eight novels. it argues that her allusiveness to the cultural practices of Ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her political project. Illuminating hegemonic America's consistent recourse to the classical world in the construction of its identity, I expand on prior scholarship by reading Morrison's own revisionary classicism as a subversion of dominant US culture. My three-part study examines the way her deployment of Graeco-Roman tradition destabilizes mythologies of the American Dream, prevailing narratives of America's history, and national ideologies of purity. Part I shows that Morrison enlists tragic conventions to problematize the Dream's central tenets of upward mobility, progress and freedom. It argues that while her engagement with Greek choric models effects her refutation of individualism, it is her later novels' rejection of a wholly catastrophic vision that enables her to avoid reinscribing the Dream. Part II demonstrates that it is through her classical allusiveness that Morrison rewrites American history. Her multiply-resonant echoes of the epic, pastoral and tragic traditions that have consistently informed the dominant culture's justifications for and representations of its actions enable her reconfiguration of colonization, of the foundation of the new nation, of slavery and its aftermath and of the Civil Rights Movement. Part III illuminates how the author uses the discourse of pollution or miasma to challenge Enlightenment-derived valorizations of racial purity and to expose the practices of scapegoating and revenge as flawed means to moral purity. Her interest in the hegemonic fabrication of classical tradition as itself a pure and purifying force is matched by her insistence on that tradition's African elements, and thus on its potent impurity. Her own radical classicism, therefore, is central to the transformation of America that her novels envision.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceArts & Humanities Research Council (Great Britain) (AHRC)University of WarwickGBUnited Kingdo

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Constructing selfhood through re-voicing the classical past: Bernardine Evaristo, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Robin Coste Lewis

This essay examines three works by three women writers whose strategies for rewriting the past include a revisionary engagement with the cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome: The Emperor’s Babe (Bernardine Evaristo, 2001) Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (Marlene NourbeSe Philip, 1991), and Voyage of the Sable Venus (Robin Coste Lewis, 2015). It argues that each embodies a mode of resistance that both protests the historic oppression of women of colour and asserts a black female agency, insisting on an empowered present and future. In achieving this, all three transgress or subvert conventional generic distinctions between verse and prose, and, in Lewis’s case, between the cultural forms and academic disciplines of art, art history and literature. Each work insists on a transnational conception of black identity, implicitly tracing black diasporic experience through Africa, Europe and the Americas, and asserting the continued interconnections between these three. And, in their confrontations with the histories of colonialism, empire and slavery, each invokes not just the history of the 17th-21st centuries CE but also the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome, the legacies of which underpinned these modern European processes of domination. Of the three works discussed here, those by Evaristo and Lewis (in part through their strategy of engaging with the traditions of Ancient Egypt, Nubia and Sudan) ultimately constitute works of greater subversive power than does that of Philip

Constructing selfhood through re-voicing the classical past: Bernardine Evaristo, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Robin Coste Lewis

This essay examines three works by three women writers whose strategies for rewriting the past include a revisionary engagement with the cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome: The Emperor’s Babe (Bernardine Evaristo, 2001) Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (Marlene NourbeSe Philip, 1991), and Voyage of the Sable Venus (Robin Coste Lewis, 2015). It argues that each embodies a mode of resistance that both protests the historic oppression of women of colour and asserts a black female agency, insisting on an empowered present and future. In achieving this, all three transgress or subvert conventional generic distinctions between verse and prose, and, in Lewis’s case, between the cultural forms and academic disciplines of art, art history and literature. Each work insists on a transnational conception of black identity, implicitly tracing black diasporic experience through Africa, Europe and the Americas, and asserting the continued interconnections between these three. And, in their confrontations with the histories of colonialism, empire and slavery, each invokes not just the history of the 17th-21st centuries CE but also the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome, the legacies of which underpinned these modern European processes of domination. Of the three works discussed here, those by Evaristo and Lewis (in part through their strategy of engaging with the traditions of Ancient Egypt, Nubia and Sudan) ultimately constitute works of greater subversive power than does that of Philip

African Athena: new agendas

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