About the Faculty

Alexander Beecroft
alexander.beecroft@yale.edu

BA (Alberta) 1995
PhD (Harvard) 2003

Areas of Specialization: the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and of China to the end of the Six Dynasties era (AD 600) Particular interests include archaic Greek epic, lyric and tragedy, Roman lyric and elegiac poetry, and Shi Jing, Chu Ci and early shi poetry in China. Other interests include anthropological and linguistic approaches to literature, cross-cultural poetics, world literature, models of intercultural literary interaction and the poetics of gender and sexuality in ancient cultures.

He is the author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in February, 2010, and is beginning work on a new project, An Ecology of Verbal Art, which will explore systems of literary production and circulation in texts ranging from Homeric epic to Roberto Bolańo’s 2666. He has also written several articles, including “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards A Typology of Literary Systems” (New Left Review 54 (Nov-Dec 2008), 87-100); “‘This is not a true story’: Stesichorus’ Palinode and the Revenge of the Epichoric” (TAPA 156.1 (2006), 47-70); “Nine Fragments in Search of an Author: Poetic Lines Attributed to Terpander” (Classical Journal 103.3 (2008), 225-41.); "Seventy-two Mandarin Ducks (Optional): Oral Formula and Intertextuality in the Chinese Yuefu Tradition" (Early Medieval China 15 (2009)); and “Blindness and Literacy in the Lives of Homer” (Forthcoming, Classical Quarterly 60.2 (Dec. 2010)).

Alexander Beecroft has particular interests in how the figure of the author is used in ancient cultures as a way of developing theories about literature, specifically about whether texts are oral or textual, and whether they are local or global in impact. He is also interested in lyric poetry as a means of reasserting the local against the universality of epic. A further area of interest (and future project) lies the use of tropes of erotic desire in the poetries of Rome and China as a means of understanding the relationship of the individual to the state. More generally, he is interested in trying to move beyond economic models for the interactions between literature to explore questions like why cultural power doesn’t necessarily follow political, military or economic power in the pre-modern world. His interest in developing theories of world literature that can accept pre-modern texts on their own terms seeks to replace prevailing economic metaphors of literary circulation with an ecological metaphor, emphasizing the status of particular literatures as operating in environmental niches in competition and interaction with other literatures.