SOURCE: Dubois, Page. “Sappho's Body-in-Pieces.” In Sappho Is Burning, pp. 55-76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt from her monograph containing feminist, materialist, and historicist approaches to Sappho, Dubois uses the example of Sappho's fragmentary poem no. “31” to suggest the central importance of fragmentation and dismemberment to our modern, theoretical understanding and reconstruction of the antique past.

One of Walter Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history expresses scorn for a certain view of historicism. He wrote: “Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.”¹ Benjamin here argues, in scandalously sexist terms, against a kind of historicism called by...