Classical Reception Scholars

Grafton’s Casaubon and the Renaissance of Classical Scholarship

The Receptionists — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 05:55:54 +0000

The twentieth century did more than proclaim the death of the author: it appointed the reader as his upstart successor. What kind of readers of texts have we become since 1967, when Barthes first published his fateful essay? Conceited ones for a start. Without the overseeing presence of the author, it seems the text lies open and yielding, ours to treat as we will. How then do we begin to exercise our new-found licence in Classics, a discipline where, in order to begin to become a reader, we must engage in linguistic training, and what follows, with history, philology, that is, with Context, that dreaded rival to our self appointed rule over the text? These, and similar questions were unwelcome guests at last year’s Triennial conference in Cambridge. The Triennial is, as the name suggests, a ritual repeated every three years, where classicists young and old gather from all around the globe in a flourishing of activity and enthusiasm in the middle of the English summer. This time, however, the mood was sombre. A recent proposal to close down the Classics faculty at Royal Holloway College in London had dampened collective spirits, and the brutal manner in which classicists were forced to choose sides, either in the History or English departments, had hit the Classics community hard. Stephen Oakley’s opening address alluded to the funereal connotation of the conference title: ‘A celebration of Classics’, with its euphemistic ring, may well be its dying song. Edith Hall paused during her plenary lecture to ‘savour each line of Sophocles’ Greek’. A few months later she would announce her resignation from Royal Holloway. Amidst the knowing sighs and defiant nods, however, there was Anthony Grafton’s address, a shining light from the Renaissance sent for the gladdening of our hearts. Professor Grafton began by declaring his subject entirely unfashionable. ‘Classical reception is hot’ – but only for its tantalizing catchwords – Love, Sex, and Death. His lecture was to shine the spotlight on their plain-looking, bespectacled cousins: Discipline, Skill, and Scholarship, exemplified in the lives of two Renaissance men of letters, Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon. The portrait of Casaubon in particular (a figure not to be confused with his namesake Edward in George Eliot’s Middlemarch), his painstaking auto-didacticism in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, his unwavering devotion to his private library (he was permanently in debt due to his book-buying habit) made my thoughts inevitably wander to the generation of facebook and twitter, and the striking contrast therein. Did Casaubon subject himself to an academic martyrdom, by modern standards? Perhaps. I think of it more as a monastic vow of poverty and obedience to the laws of language, and in two canons, the Judaeo-Christian, and the classical one, no less. Casaubon’s was a vow of continence too – he is reported to have eventually died from a calcified bladder, so loathe was he to abandon his book room to answer the call of nature. The image of the lonely Casaubon, leaning over his book-wheel, could easily be dismissed a shadow of a long outdated past. Yet the parallels with task of the modern classicist abound: the awareness of tradition, transmission, and accuracy was not only the domain of the nineteenth century philologists, but practiced in Europe’s Renaissance academies. As were the parallels between Casaubon and Grafton himself, whom Malcolm Scholfield introduced as ‘quite simply, the most learned man in the world’. Grafton ended his lecture with a call to arms: many more tomes remain, neglected, awaiting a latter day saint to exercise the same devotion to the text that the Renaissance scholars had in their short and remarkable lifetimes. On the whitewashed walls of this lecture hall in 2011, a blown up image of Casaubon’s delicate handwriting adorned a copy of Strabo’s Geographica. The world of the ancients, seen again through six hundred year old eyes, could exist for us, in this moment, as it did for them, to delight and to instruct the living.

Professor Grafton’s lecture “How classical was the classical revival?” can be downloaded here: http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/seminars_conferences/triennial_conference_plenary/

Update: Last week I received an email with the announcement that eight and a half months after the first announcement of the dissolution of the department, there would be no redundancies in Classics at Royal Holloway at the University of London.

Kalina Ślaska-Sapała

Why Reception?

The Receptionists — Thu, 05 May 2011 04:02:19 +0000

What is the point of Reception Studies? This is the kind of question Receptionists get a little too frequently, and more often from classicists than from those on the other side of the divide. English folk (and their theatre studies, art history, film and philosophy brethren) do not seem to have much difficulty with the idea of studying the Classics’ influence on more modern spheres of intellectual activity. There might be the occasional comment that ‘it’s boring’ or that ‘Latin’s too hard’, but generally there is a more accepting atmosphere, which accommodates people with an interest in anything, even really, really old stuff. So many things are accepted as academic topics—science fiction, chick lit, children’s stories—that there is relatively little difficulty with the idea an English student who focuses on the ancients. Classicists, on the other hand, often do little more than allow that Reception is something which might be interesting to think about in one’s spare time. A reasonable chunk of the classical academics out there quite clearly feel that, whilst possibly interesting, this ‘reception stuff’ has nothing to do with Classics proper. (All of which involves shocking generalisations, but this is a blog, not an academic paper, and I’m allowed a few).

There are two stock answers to the ‘Why Reception’ question. Firstly, it is argued that reception opens up a further (and very large) area of study for scholars, in what is a somewhat limited discipline. People who talk about ‘saving’ the Classics argue that, as there are only so many Classical texts, one day, if not already, everything possible will have been said about them, and so we need to find more texts to talk about. Reception opens up a wealth of extra texts. Another argument states that if Classics is to survive as a discipline, it needs to become more accessible to a new, and younger, audience. Billed as being all about survival, Reception is a lifeboat for when all the classical ships sink, or pass by, unnoticed, into obscurity.

Both of these reasons are deeply unsatisfying to me, and I think they are in part the reason why many classicists resent the discipline of Reception Studies. If these are the reasons on which it is founded (and to the die-hard classicist, they are fairly insulting ones), then the discipline itself can seem rather offensive, detracting from the inherent value and projected future of Classics. This is without even mentioning the general implication that Reception is an easier field of study than ‘proper’ Classics, and therefore weak. Again, any self respecting classicist, who has undergone years of rigorous language training, tends to have a fair amount of disdain for the ‘easy’ disciplines.

The biggest problem for me in any of these definitions, objections and justifications, is that they all reinforce the idea of a divide. We have named our conference ‘Straddling the Divide’ for a reason, as we believe there is a very real gulf between the study of the ancient world and of its presence in our modern one (some might call it ‘The Middle Ages’, but I’m sure most medievalists would disagree with that, and perhaps for the reasons I’m about to discuss). It is a divide which we feel in our study of classical reception, especially because of the seeming necessity to stretch ourselves across different academic departments. The divide for reception scholars is not just academic: it is also administrative, and often exists in the minds of other PhD students and even academic staff, as they attempt to categorize reception students into a single field of future employment. We always seem to be doing and dealing with two different things at once. The ‘divide’ is a real presence in our approach to our study.

What I wish to argue is that the divide should not be there at all. It is the divide itself which is the problem, which makes it so difficult to explain our work, and to convince sceptics that this kind of work is not just important to classical scholarship, but constitutes classical scholarship in its own right. As I see it, there is no difference between the work I do on Latin poetry and the work I do on English poetry. It is all just poetry. It happens to be in two different languages and from two different periods, but that difference is no different than in comparing Dickens’ novels with Eliot’s poetry, or Theocritus’ bucolics with Virgil’s eclogues. The process is the same. The analysis brought to bear on the texts is the same. The only difference is that imposed by classification systems.

When universities first began, there were no different subjects. Everything fell under the heading of what we would today call Theology and Classics. For hundreds of years the pursuit of the Classics was the cornerstone of a proper education. This isn’t to say our predecessors had a limited knowledge, but that ‘the Classics’ was not seen as a discrete field of knowledge. If you knew the Classics, you could be said to know everything – everything deemed worth knowing, that is. This idea harks back to the Greeks and Romans, for whom all the areas of knowledge were contained within, and began with their canonical sources. Western literature begins with Homer, Philosophy with Plato, Science with Aristotle, History with Herodotus, Theology with Homer, Hesiod, and later, the Greek New Testament, Drama with Sophocles and Euripides, Rhetoric with Cicero. And it is the same today. The ‘Classics’ has become a term used to separate the literature and knowledge of the ancient world out from other sources, but it is not actually a concrete discipline in itself. Instead, it is the first source for almost every other discipline (modern science and medicine being the notable exception – I’m perfectly happy with doctors never learning some of the funky theories their ancient counterparts held).

I do not study Classics and English, I study literature, and Western literature begins with Homer and encompasses the Greek and Latin poets, philosophers and playwrights. There is no discontinuum, there is no divide. And this is certainly how the poets of the Renaissance, in whom I am most interested, approached the world. Shakespeare did not use Ovid because he was an ancient, but because he wrote the poetry that fitted most with his own interests.

So the point of Classical Reception, as I see it, is to try to soften the artificial divide which tries to remove the study of the Classics from other disciplines. Reception is not about ‘saving’ the Classics from neglect and misunderstanding, but about reintegrating knowledge of the ancients into all areas of the Humanities – to where it rightly belongs.

Corinna Box

Hello world!

The Receptionists — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:19:27 +0000

STRADDLING THE DIVIDE //

Reception Studies Today

This is to announce ‘Straddling the Divide// Reception Studies Today’, a conference aimed a postgraduate students interested in Classical Reception. The conference will be held at the University of Melbourne on the 1^st and 2^nd of December 2011. Our Call for Papers will be announced in June/July, but we are currently seeking indications of interest. Please email us at receptionpostgrads@gmail.com; join our Facebook group, ‘Reception Post-grads’; and don’t forget to follow our site!

What is Classical Reception?

Classical Reception is the study of how the literature, history, language and culture of the ancient world has shaped our own. The ancients felt that ‘it all began with Homer’ and this holds true today, whether you find echoes of Homer’s epic program in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or in Star Wars, or simply know of him from The Simpsons, where even the name ‘Homer’ invokes a unique but familiar vocabulary of Western literary thought. The way we write about war, religion, history and love is built on foundations laid down during classical antiquity. Stories and archetypes from the Greek and Roman worlds continue, so that it is impossible to speak of a disjuncture between ancient and modern retellings of the fate of Troy, the dilemma of Oedipus, or any story from the vast corpus of classical mythology. Classical Reception, therefore, seeks to better understand these links between Western culture and the classical past.

Conference Aims

In light of the various paradoxes, uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding Classical Reception, its practice and its place in the academic discourse, we are interested in exploring the definition of ‘Reception’ itself. In a field where the definition of culture, text and intertext is fluid; how are the Classics translated to modern researchers working across the humanities?

This conference aims to bring together scholars in Australia, particularly postgraduates, who are interested in the classical tradition and to ask what is unique about the Australian vision of Classical Reception. We hope to facilitate meetings between scholars who otherwise would not have the opportunity to interact in such an interdisciplinary forum. Those who work in reception are often found in Classics departments, but may also be working in English Literature, Linguistics, Art History, Drama, History, Philosophy or even Fine Arts, Architecture or Politics. As such it can be difficult to know who around you is working on research which interacts with the classical world. We hope to find you all at this conference.

While our primary focus is on literary reception, we welcome other approaches to the Classics: the twentieth century has certainly shown us how broad and all-encompassing the notion of the “text” can be. This conference will provide a comfortable and supportive, yet critically rigorous, forum in which to discuss the meaning and direction of Reception Studies in Australia today. We hope to show this by having the conference proceedings published. This still relatively new discipline is constantly creating new ways of interacting with and understanding our classical heritage, and we want you to be part of that discussion!