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Sappho is Burning
To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation. How is it then, Page duBois asks, that this poet has come to signify so much? Sappho Is Burning offers a new reading of this archaic lesbian poet that acknowledges the poet's distance and difference from us and stresses Sappho's inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject.
In Sappho is Burning, duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive figure at the very origin of our story of Western civilization. Sappho is beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of reductively linear accounts of our common history. She is a woman, but also an aristocrat, a Greek, but one turned toward Asia, a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy, a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality, nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named as the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients, troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. DuBois argues that we need to read Sappho again.
In Sappho is Burning, duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive figure at the very origin of our story of Western civilization. Sappho is beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of reductively linear accounts of our common history. She is a woman, but also an aristocrat, a Greek, but one turned toward Asia, a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy, a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality, nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named as the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients, troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. DuBois argues that we need to read Sappho again.
213 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 1, 2012
This is the sort of book that shows the time in which it was written. This may make the book less appealing to some. And, conversely, more appealing to others who are interested in that sort of thing. Also, some of the ideas are maybe a little dated. That said, this is a good book. And still worth reading if you have any interest in Sappho. I especially liked duBois' work on the fragment, fragmentation, and the fragmentary.
June 5, 2017
Page duBois is one of the most important scholars of antiquity in our generation. She has written so much on almost every topic and she always writes with great wisdom and clarity. This book provides several new ways of thinking about Sappho. duBois acknowledges that she is approaching Sappho from a feminist and post-structuralist perspective. Wait! Don't run away yet. This is not the straw-man of obfuscatory postmodern theory. There are moments when the prose grows dense, but these are well-spaced and a majority of what you read here is informative, well-expressed, and convincing. Whether you are new to Sappho or you are a scholar of antiquity, you can get something from this book.
Re: the book's avowed feminist, poststurcturalist perspective. Some of the points she makes seem less impressive now than the probably were when the book came out in 1995. But this only shows how on-point she was, and how mainstream some of her points have become. Some of the issues that duBois handles: the fragmentary nature of Sappho's corpus, the nature of the subjectivity that her text presents, the relationship of Sappho to the monolithic philosophical discourse that derives form Plato and his descendents, Sappho's lesbianism, Sappho's Eastern origins. The book makes these points through well-supported arguments that rely on close-reading, historial study, and theoretical speculation.
It is hard to summarize the points she makes in a more thorough way (partly because I took so long to finish this book). Often, essays return to points made previously and help reinforce her point. My copy is covered in pencil from the important sections I circled and the notes I made to myself. In the end, this is a monumental piece of scholarship both as literary reading and as feminist philosophy (it pairs well with Cavarero's In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, but is much easier to read).
Re: the book's avowed feminist, poststurcturalist perspective. Some of the points she makes seem less impressive now than the probably were when the book came out in 1995. But this only shows how on-point she was, and how mainstream some of her points have become. Some of the issues that duBois handles: the fragmentary nature of Sappho's corpus, the nature of the subjectivity that her text presents, the relationship of Sappho to the monolithic philosophical discourse that derives form Plato and his descendents, Sappho's lesbianism, Sappho's Eastern origins. The book makes these points through well-supported arguments that rely on close-reading, historial study, and theoretical speculation.
It is hard to summarize the points she makes in a more thorough way (partly because I took so long to finish this book). Often, essays return to points made previously and help reinforce her point. My copy is covered in pencil from the important sections I circled and the notes I made to myself. In the end, this is a monumental piece of scholarship both as literary reading and as feminist philosophy (it pairs well with Cavarero's In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, but is much easier to read).
November 13, 2016
I suppose you could say simply enough that Sappho Is Burning is duBois's reading of Sappho and the Sapphic fragments against the masculine tradition of Eurocentric humanism and completion, but for me that misses out on the subtlety of her readings; the variety, the care and the situatedness that reflects on others outside, within, and itself. Against a dissociative masculine generalism that homes in the classical tradition, reading and rereading Sappho can be seen as lived recovery of the particular and alternative. Understandably, duBois is wary of Plato and the lingering threat of transcending that Plato represents. Not for itself, but for what it masks. In particular, for what fresh readings of Plato as playful and textually subversive might miss and allow again.
May 28, 2008
I had to read this as an undergrad, and although I am a little sketchy on the specifics at this point, I remember thinking how interesting a study this was. Sappho is an interesting writer/poet/feminist in her own rite, and all the more intriguing because so little is actually known about her. The analysis of her writing, and the speculations about her early influences shed a little light on a figure that is normally so cloaked in mystery. This one is definitely worth picking up if your looking for a little "history's literary mysteries" on Sappho.
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