Bryn Mawr Classical Review

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Here is a spectacular volume from the massive series of 'Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World', now a dozen and a half strong and another ten announced in preparation. At five hundred odd pages and thirty-five contributions (plus the introduction; each tailed with a stocky paragraph of Further Reading), it is standard in size, and when it becomes available in paperback will be a book for (e.g.) just about anyone involved in higher education to own; the hardback can only be priced for university and departmental library acquisition. But the editors have pulled in a wider splay of trades and topics than any of their companions' companions or their own now mushrooming rivals can boast. The latter include many a project produced and/or managed by the editors, whose foundational roles in shaping and inventing new ways to prove and learn from the limitlessness of classical culture, classical studies, classics in culture and classics as discipline, make them the right ringmasters. Perhaps I should say, not 'pulled in', but rather released (as in 'released into the wild'), since, among the informative surveys and stylish essays, there are necessarily some daring jeux here that don't stand much chance of catching on as they head for the outré. The volume has to have flash, as exemplum sui; equally the review must stick to plain survey. Anticipating use of the volume frustillatim, I shall fill in contents where titles do not; but I should just note that I enjoyed taking the whole trip, and there must be a good half dozen of the very best here, on anyone's terms.

The pieces (listed at the end of the review) come in eight batches, or 'Parts':

The introduction briskly scrolls through the programme in minimi-summary style, besides insisting on the plurimalismS the volume on classicS is bound to host while giving a health warning about the 'democratic turn' often touted for reception studies (cf. esp. Greenwood, p.98); pointing to '"meta-commentary" on cultural practices' as the true heartbeat of the business and hot sites of intersection and conflict between modes of receiving and transforming traditions as its hunting ground; and guying us with notice that the editors' own papers were pulled from the collection 'in a spirit of virtuous self-denial' (p.2). Graziosi will cite Hardwick's definition of 'students of reception [as] essentially concerned with "the artistic or intellectual processes involved in selecting, imitating or adapting ancient works"' (p.32), and most contributors can sail under that flag.

But Porter (Ch. 35. For one; see too esp. Hall) wants more thunder, demanding oblivion for lingering ideologies built round 'classical studies and their objects as timeless and eternal' and re-positioning classics as irrefragable 'guide to modernity' (p.469; cf. Schein, p.84; contrast Ch. 25). Classical studies have a history, as a reception of Greek and Roman culture and its own histories and as a reception history of that history and of that reception; these intellectual quests for knowledge, for negotiating conditions of 'knowledge', should segue into any worthwhile commentary that can be offered on the past's propulsion into any thinking future (p.471). P. demands 'a satisfactory theory' of our own for classics as/and reception, but meantime tips out a truckload of ideas for directions to launch out in. These are rounded up, maybe topped, by reception of reception 'from a metatheoretical perspective' (p.477). More directly and less mediatedly, from the vantage-point of volume retrospect, P. faces up to the problem of the era of reception: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Some sectors of enquiry can best get along with, but some without, the participation of omnimath or ipsist 'classicists' -- but which (and who could answer)? Given that there is no such thing as a free-flow classroom but that there is every need to articulate even plurimidisciplinary syllabi, what sort of credentials or profiles or role models should the 'new kind of classicist-academic' go for, and look for? P. first tries breaking out of the 'academic' academy to advocate plugging into the pit of 'public life' even if that means winning ugly on the glampuss media, but finally reins in to vouchsafe us a tamer intra-mural dream of 'true interdisciplinarity', between classics and 'its neighbours' on campus (p.481). Cheers, of course, but for 'Lord Chesterfield' élitists like me (p.389), you know: no optative, no ablative is no future, just poor reception. Those wise editors prequelled everything with their catch-all last word: 'There are exciting times ahead' (p.9).

I Reception within Antiquity and Beyond

Ch. 1 plays 'tradition' as conceived in the Anacreontic tradition (through Cowley) off against 'tradition' in the ambit of Homer (seen as already a 'cool' project of familiarizing its precursors). This so as to (show how to) resist self-valorizing reification of 'tradition', which should function as 'a pliable tool for suggesting new perspectives. ... The concept is there for the taking' (p.24). (Surely ironic abjection of 'tradition' lurks in this cut-loose voluntarism?)

Ch. 2 then traces first the birth of the author and the text Homer, and second Homeric intertextuality and intermediality, to Virgil (and Walcott).

In Ch. 3 Plato's dialogues (apparently founded in 'the total absence of the voice of Plato himself', 39) infiltrate and displace traditional discourses of political wisdom (Homer and Athenian theatre), by taking over showbiz and powering an 'alternative dramatic stage' (p.49): see Ion and Symposium.

Ch. 4 does the Persian Empire over, twice over, as orientalist 'distortion' by what we call 'Ancient Greeks' and by its post-Rawlinson 'rediscovery'. Harrison (Tom: see my last corrigendum below!) picks out Zoroastrian religion, monumental ruins and imperial grandeur as eternalizing themes that fuel valuation of, and rhetorical capital tying up, and tied up in, Iran through to today. He wants disjunction in his versions of history; we should face our templates and attend to their genealogies; and try listening to some occidentalist marginalizing of those 'Greeks' at the periphery of the view from Susa.

Ch. 5 homes on the fraught transit of Classical Greek Literature through successive educational curricula that then ran the gauntlet of C4th Christianization. Basil, 'To the young men on how to benefit from Hellenic texts' conducts a more or less standard appropriation of Homer for psychic palpation of pupils toward 'virtue', but tragic theatre must remain too dubious, compromising, and taboo-ridden for comfort. (Too entertaining, even when aetiolated to excerpts for solo song.)

II Transmission, Acculturation and Critique

In Ch. 6 Schein rustles up a word study for 'classics/classical' (and throws in 'canon/canonical'), from Antiquity through Renaissance humanism to Winckelmann, then in C19th schooling in the United States and through 1920s-1940s Anglo-American investment in identification with classics' talk of 'legacy' and 'heritage' . This ideology is today unmasked by re-definition and dissemination of the 'we' that was then still smuggled into 'Our debt to Greece and Rome' formulations.

Ch. 7 gives Gladstone's stable take on classics, as he moved in time from 'liberal Conservative', owing much to Aristotelian political ethics, to 'fully fledged Liberal' shoring up a Grote-busting faith in an undivided mankind evincing freedom, nationality, and humanity: something in the Late Victorian air made fantasy apologetics come to vindicate Homer's write-up of the Olympian pantheon.

So to political feuding in the Caribbean over the rooting of liberal education in Aristotelian teachings, in a 1950s saga tracked by Greenwood through excerpts from the Trinidad Guardian (= Ch. 8). She uncovers there, in a pre-independence context, a perspective from the colonized that can map onto ancient political rhetoric and peel away intrusive First World misconceptions that idealize classical democracy blind.

Ch. 9 scrutinizes 'the English Virgil' Tennyson's To Virgil and Arnold's Memorial Verses for Wordsworth before hopping to pastoral poems from Frost tilting at Rooseveldt, and then, a world later, squaring with, or up to, Kennedy's well-versed inauguration as President. (Here Harrison -- Stephen -- is naughtily disingenuous in presenting the close of Eclogue 1 [p.120] as: 'the two do not part but Tityrus offers the dispossessed Meliboeus hospitality for the night'. Rather read: 'the two part but Tityrus' & c.). Finally, Heaney, 'Bann Valley Eclogue' gives another, millennial, messianic life to Eclogue 4. This contribution is one tempting taster from new work on new poems that renew Virgil's own newest poetry, and renews my faith in this old essayistic idiom, of intertextual expertise.

III Translation

Ch. 10 harks back to the 60s brand of Arion and its New Critical pitch for translation of classical poetry by poets of today, resuscitating Harold Mason's shift at promulgating terms for what Jan Parker has recently re-framed as 'literature through translation'. Hopkins picks Pope's Sarpedon to Glaucus from Iliad 12.371-96 to model multiply reflexive response to cultural difference between Homeric, then Augustan, then contemporary (not least Parkerian) worlds of narrative and narration. Here is a micronic moment of reception as textual re-productivity.

Ch. 11 takes us to Egypt and the late arrival of classical studies (i.e. Greek Literature), well into the C20th, over the once formidable barrier of ye gods, of myth's hold on Homer and tragedy. Lyric poetry was the way in, and verse drama was a challenge, now well met notably through the good offices of Cairo Radio. With the new Alexandria Library open, ancient Greece is up and running in Egypt, and -- here is the bridgehead for Arab receptions more generally. We must get to know about this.

The title of Ch. 12 quotes Tom Stoppard on the need for less than 'absolutely strict translation'. Walton chews over Dover's mauling of Lowell's Oresteia to point up general questions ('are they [classical translators] the in-betweens or go-betweens?', p.157), before settling on Agamemnon's Watchman, Antigone 's Guard, and Xuthus' grab for what must be his son (in) Ion as crises for tonality in translation strategy.

Ch. 13 reviews instances of 'verbal' and 'referential' negotiation of Old Comic humour, before complexifying with 'the cultural turn' to humour theory and prodding us to go theorize humour in translation. (On p.179, does Robson get the joke that the name 'Amunias' in Clouds 688-92 carries the right semantic load for repelling boarders?)

IV Theory and Practice

The Gide of Ch. 14 is early: Le traité du Narcisse is a poetological recusatio, and Le Prométhée Mal Enchainé invokes a curse on humanity -- the curse of 'the devouring belief in progress'. Evidently 'Gide's ego-centrism represents an ethics of relating to the classical past' (p.194).

Margaret Atwood's 2005 Penelopiad launches Zajko's quest for a right place for feminist readings of classical literature to land, clear of postfeminism and into a beyond where pastmodernism will receive inoculation with feminist receptionS of feminism at the point of delivery (Ch. 15).

In Ch. 16 Freud's Freudian 'archaeology' imagery scotches absurd myths of ahistoricality at the foundation of psychoanalysis: the boot's on the other foot, as Leonard exposes the latent 'presentism' in many versions of theory-lite reception (some below), memorably asserting 'the "inherent latency" within history itself' (p.217).

Ch. 17 covers much ground to warn against 'canonization' as success category and 'periodization' as neutral spreadsheet in performance reception, lest they smooth the drama out of theatre, pre-programme dogma into event.

V Performing Arts

So to performance features. First Ch. 18 on the transformission from play to libretto to opera in the case of Gluck's Iphigénie contrasted with Strauss's musical framing of Hofsmannsthal's new wave Nietzschean script for Elektra.

Then Ch. 19 'map[s] the Oedipus' as Sophocles' play hits cinema, first in 1912 as Mounet-Sully's Oedipe Roi, then ballet, with Martha Graham's 1947 Night Journey. Here, we learn, medium joins cultural historical context in re-marking Oedipus over against Jocasta as loaded versions of representation (and refusal to represent).

Ch. 20's review of the C20th record on masking, costuming, kinesics, and choreography of actor vs chorus in Greek plays brings us (to) new technology -- 'the digital matrix in 3D' -- to supplement the traditional 'practice-based research' methods of theatre studies (pp.272-3). With Ch. 23 and Ch. 25, this is about the closest we shall come to Stray-style close-up on teaching tools, methods, spiel in agendo. Wot, no reception room for Mr Chips at the chalkface?

Pow: Ch. 21 bursts the frame and shatters belief with Artaud-inspired 'nomadic theatre': an Orestea, a Giulio Cesare (at last a -- post- -- Roman happening) and, for microbiological pièce de résistance, Sanzio's far-out Tragedia Endogonidia where bodies and clownage are in, names and stories and scripts are out. Still the receptivities startled from spectators court and guy, attest and obliviate, 'the classical', perhaps always insistent where it is most absented.

For some real danger, Yaari seats us slap bang in the Khan Theatre of Jerusalem to watch a 2002 amalgam of Acharnians, Knights and Lysistrata called The War Over Home, instigated by Yaari himself: Ch. 22. Set in 2012 Jerusalem but reflecting news -- i.e. real -- events of 2002 Jerusalem through projection of stalled repetition through prolepsis of a decade, it spells danger, brings 'democracy' out to play, and the extreme provocations of this specific reception history engross a half-century of dramatic conflict. In this dozen live pages acting gets paradigmatically real, as politics bring the house down and theatre hits home.

VI Film

Ch. 23 expertly landscapes 'classics on film' studies to set up 'meta-reception' as the intellectual target -- the self-reflexive status of 'films on classics' as receptionS (sc. of reception).

Ch. 24 focusses on triangulating Odysseus vs Cyclops between the Odyssey, the 1955 'Kirk Douglas' Ulysses and the 1997 Odyssey TV series from NBC with Armand Assante. Roisman does 'sensibility' up close, finding contrasting heroisms and deontologies in the detail (with authority figured as Poseidon).

Ch. 25 plugs teaching film as plugging into Greek 'greatness' through myth. So the featured reading of Star Wars is couched in a nowadays obtrusive idiom of aeternitas formulae: 'Myth has always been a means of confronting man's deepest fears...' leads straight to 'What is established in the first three films is a thesis that lies at the core of Greek tragedy, the gods teach wisdom through suffering' and Anakin/Darth Vader 'has the same off-putting characteristics as many Sophoclean heroes' (pp.330, 332, 335). A more compelling, less routinist, viewing recoups The Crying Game (1993) through Bacchae, but recoups it for a pedagogy locked onto 'develop[ing] an appreciation for texts that are the cultural treasures of the human race. ... Myths that are true to the human spirit'. With a last trump from square T. S. Eliot, fade and cut.

VII Cultural Politics

With Ch. 26 comes respite from Greek epic and theatre with a so stylish essay from Edwards on visiting Rome as if you own the place. She ambles us through Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Mazzini's dreams, the Victor Emmanuel II wedding cake, half-baked Forum Romanum excavations, and chorussed regrets for the capital of Italy re-build, before guiding us through her guidebook: 22 editions' worth of Augustus Hare's Walks in Rome. You have to be there, but you can't. Because 'The Rome we want can never be ours' (p.359).

Purely temporary respite, though: Ch. 27 ushers us straight back to Athens and its theatre, to share the company of, truly, 'The Greeks, the Bad, and the Ugly' (p.366). Van Steen graphically rehearses the nationalistic culture war that led from outrage at the unGreek Queen's demotic NT in 1901 (the Euangeli(a)ka) to student vs police riots and fatalities outside the Greek Royal Theatre over an adulterated Aeschylus in 1903 (the Oresteiaka). This demo, orchestrated by agitprop lectures by the reactionary/patriotic Professor from the University of Athens, fed on doomed resistance to sullying German-Romantic infliction of Mendelssohn's irresistible musical Antigone on Hellas as well as the rest of fast bourgeoisifying Eurokultchur. (The purist production by said Professor, Mistriotis, had been 'a terrible flop' in 1896, p.369.) And those Greeks have now even coined a word for it, too: åAntigonismus!

Ch. 28 surveys the past half-century of South Africa as staged through its Greek(-derived) plays (and epitomates van Zyl Smit's powerful set of interlinked but scattered studies). Featured are a 2002 Afrikaaner (Flemish-and-Dutch) Mamma Medea and a 2003 Oresteia vamp called Molora (= 'Ashes') with chorus in Xhosa and the cast 'black, save Clytemnestra'. Here 'the chorus also represent the public at the Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings and they persuade Electra to hand over the axe with which she plans to kill her mother' (p.379). Comedy follows Aristophanic satire through the liberation to a 1996 University of Cape Town Frogs, whose parabasis Named Names and echoed 'Nelson Mandela's stirring inauguration speech, delivered only three days before the production opened' (p.381). But this is hot plurimi-culture territory, beggaring stereotype, and here 'contemporary trends' encompass a re-de-familiarizing, ultra-'traditional', 2002 Bacchae; a 2004 'Africanizing' Antigone; a feminist O.T. called Jocasta Rising; and a post-theatre 2005 Medeia, in Xhosa-English, which staged both play and action in a shantytown Colchis out in the veldt. Here the 'audience' must share the village's precarious resourcelessness, its exposure to marauding Argonaut gang and corrupt 'African dictator' Creon alike: and yet and still anew, a new Medea 'survives -- at the cost of losing all illusions about life and love' (p.384). We need to know this is happening. All of it.

In Ch. 29 Hall gives a second word study of 'classics' (cf. Ch. 6), feinting with Hardy's Jude before pulling us onto her classy combination punch. We should all have to squirm our way through her nine-step interrogation of class-blindness and class-blinkeredness, ubiquitous to the point of near-constitutive throughout classical studies. Thus: what class have classicists belonged to and how did they become receivers? How have class agenda framed differential receptionS of canons and genres and works and translations and media? And (the killer) how have class politics and class-consciousness shaped scholars' interventions and the impact of their work? Required reading, most of all for us toffs (and new toffs).

VIII Changing Contexts

Ch. 30: the Nobel laureate Walcott's Iliadic, or Virgilianizing hybrid, epic Omeros is pressed for the poetological trope of the bird, alongside his less known re-play The Odyssey: A Stage Version. His postcolonial transcultural realization of reception twines subtly with the startling 1977 Odyssean collages in blue and blue-grey by the artist Romare Bearden which we have been looking forward to investigating ever since The Sea God and Odysseus Leaves Circe frontispieced the volume and introduction: Figs 0.1 and 0.2. In Davis' account their tapping into iconic imagery pegged to Homer presumes and prorogues the myth of art as opening (onto) 'a universal substrate of human experience'. As Walcott's play has it: 'The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores' (p.414). That's the poetics, but, again receptionS insist, how about their politics?

In Ch. 31 decline and fall in futuristic Roman-American Empires drive Brown's intergalactic romp through SF; but then she transworlds to Dan Simmons' Ilium (2003) and Olympos, and other post-Hellenic morphs and cyborgs. A zappy tailpiece clinches the element of 'alternative history' featured in obtrusively deviant re-writes of the classics.

You do not see Ch. 32 coming. Hursthouse piles into energetic rescue of Aristotelian moral philosophy from Kantian deontics, post-Mill utilitarianism, and the last half-century's failure to heed Anscombe's 1958 call for the recovery of virtue and 'human "flourishing"' (p.429). Scarily straight-talking prosecution of 'Virtue Ethics' gets the repair it needs in order to cope with demands for 'practical action guidance', and, at the 'meta-ethical' level, to ride the transcultural 'justification problem'. Borrow ammunition against 'moral cultural relativism' from the 1990s global 'Virtues Project(TM) out of Canada, which has produced a UN-accredited list of fifty-two virtues named in 'the world's sacred texts' (yes, 'one for each week of the year'), and put it into secular terms - then you'll already be practising a reception of Aristotle which delivers the goods, namely injunctions to pursue virtueS translatable into all other languages 'as virtue terms'. So here's a jolt for postmodernist complacencies and a stranger crashing the companions' party rapped up in one.

By contrast Ch. 33 just had to come! Nude fin de siècle photography of the statuesque strongman Eugene Sandow meets arty 'classicizing' snaps by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, in the idiom of John Addington Symonds' Sicilian shepherd boys.

A careful piece impugning long-fossilized receptions of 'The Poetry of the Great War' as uniformly 'protest' completes the set: Ch. 34. How excentrically the soldier-classicists mapped Homer's Trojan warscapes onto unassimilable experience at Gallipoli, athwart ironic geographical contiguity: Nowell Oxland, 'Outward Bound' (1915) and Patrick Shaw-Stewart's only known poem, 'I saw a Man This Morning'. 1917; and, less insistently and seizably, onto deuotio on the Western Front: Julian Grenfell's 'Into Battle', 1915. On the same Front (geographically), Wilfred Owen follows, Greekless but Latinate receiver of Homer, imagining a 'Strange Meeting' that blurs Iliadic bloodbath and longing for ablution into Odyssean katabasis; and behind him there's Isaac Rosenberg, 'from a poor immigrant family, left school at fourteen and largely self-taught in literature, served as a private, enlisted because his family needed the money': out-poppying Homer (Iliad 8.306-08) in 'Break of Day in the Trenches'. Vandiver's Stand in the Trench, Achilles will present the full panorama, forthcoming from OUP in 2009). Here is the volume's working-class hero, in the nick of time, out in no man's land, receiving classics, loud and clear.

[Corrigenda: p.2 that [that]. p.101 Ben Johnson. p.132 might have [been] hoped ... paraphastic. p.133 chieftans. The Englishing of Ch. 11 has not been fully academicized, but that may be an apt 'democratic' provocation, as well as acting out a certain paradoxical 'rising Occidentalism in the east' (p.141). p.163 [at] the approach. p.171 one the other hand. p.173 such [as] required. p.179 Sommerstein 2002 not in Bibliography. p.196 feminists[s] who grew up. p.206 she'[s] been causing. p.208 In [the] studying the ... the debate[s] within Classics parallels. p.209 in this account 'passes away', there is --> in this account, 'passes away'; there is. p.210 origins of [a] relief. p.227 One the other hand. p.253 has shown (and to whom). p.254 particular[l]y ... salutory. p.284 And like in. p.286 influenced to deeply the western consciousness --> i. the w. c. so d. p.291 of [the] life in Jerusalem. p.332 Aesch, 176-83 --> Aesch. Agam. 179-83. p.388 since the [last] 1980s. p.406 some [of] its occurrences. p.426 Roberts (2006) not in Bibliography. p.429 deonotology ... consequentuialist. p.438 fifty two [all] virtues. p.474 necessar[il]y. p.520 (s. n. Roisman 2005b) Nester ..., CQ 551. The reference system, 'Harrison 2008', can be fun to navigate -- there are five sets of Harrisoniana to pick from.]

Contents:

Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray. 'Introduction: Making Connections': 1-9

Ch. 35. James I. Porter, 'Reception Studies: Future Prospects': 469-81

With Contents, List of (20) Figures; Bibliography, Index.