CJ-ONLINE Archives

September 2009

CJ-ONLINE@LISTS.UMN.EDU

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Reply To:
Classical Journal On-Line <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:05:15 -0500
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (165 lines)
Classics and the Uses of Reception. Edited by CHARLES MARTINDALE AND 
RICHARD F. THOMAS. Classical Receptions. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2006. Pp. xiii + 335. Paper, $42.95. ISBN 1–4051–3145–4.

Order this text for $42.95 from Amazon.com using this link and benefit
CAMWS and the Classical Journal:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/classjourn-20

Previously published CJ Online reviews are at
http://classicaljournal.org/reviews.php


CJ Online 2009.09.04

Contributors: William Batstone, Katie Fleming, Simon Goldhill, Lorna
Hardwick, Kenneth Haynes, John Henderson, Ralph Hexter, Craig Kallendorf,
Helen Kaufmann, Duncan Kennedy, Miriam Leonard, Alexandra Lianeri,
Genevieve Liveley, Charles Martindale, Siobhán McElduff, Pantelis
Michelakis, James Porter, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Timothy Saunders, Mathilde
Skoie, Richard Thomas, Tim Whitmarsh, Vanda Zajko

As Charles Martindale points out in his introduction to this collection,
Reception Studies has become, in the years since the publication of his
Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (1993),
a mainstream critical modality in Classics. One could add, invoking
Classics’ reputation as the literary discipline most behind the curve of
new critical thought, that Rezeptionsästetik and related Reader-Response
criticisms have finally found their way into our musty, old discipline. The
Konstanz School got under way in the 1960s, after all, and the work of its
early participants, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Juri Striedter,
Manfred Fuhrmann and Jürgen Habermas, as well as the Reader-Response
criticisms of Stanley Fish, Michael Riffaterre, Norman Holland and many
others, were dominant forces in the critical constellation of English and
Modern Language studies throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Reception’s
arrival at the cusp of the 21st century in Classics might thus seem a
belated theoretical colonization with—given that the theoretical tide has
moved on elsewhere—limited prospects.

But I think that that impression would be incorrect. Classics has a
particular stake in critical thought that addresses the problem of our (as
classicists and readers) historical alienation from the texts we read.
Their recession in time and circumstance from our own, together with their
perdurance(?) or continuing relevance(?), is a paradox built right into any
fair conception of what Classics is. Classicists set out to address that
paradox somehow, either with traditional tools in an attempt to discover
precisely what was written and meant then in order that we may know this
increasingly distant pastness better now, or, with other kinds of tools to
discover how these texts have made their way to us, their (changing) shapes
and colors of meaning fitted out for the long journey forward. In either
case, the very “classic” nature of these texts entails an understanding
of them through time. As Miriam Leonard puts it in one of these chapters,
paraphrasing Gadamer, “we are condemned to look upon [the Graeco-Roman
tradition] with the eyes of strangers” (p. 117). The final gloss on that
may be tragic: our alienation is irremediable, and however we work to
repair our ignorance, we cannot reconstitute the world our texts were born
into. Or it may be radically optimistic, if we conceive of our classics as
in constant dialogue with human sensibility and literature and art through
time—and this is the view of most of the contributors to this volume.

It is a heartening view on a number of counts, not least in that it blows
apart linear conceptions of “the classics and their legacy”: the
(legitimate) classical past, the (marginal) classical tradition, the
present (state of “Classics in decline”). In place of this conceptual
segmentation, Reception posits a more pliant and interactive relationship
among texts and readers. Thus while the Classical Tradition has long
represented the set of post-classical texts that can trace parentage or
“influences” to classical works, Reception Studies consider a wider
range of relational possibilities. Later texts are not only influenced by
classical models, but always in some sense exert a countervailing
influence. Postclassical authors recast their “Classics,” and they are
themselves recast by subsequent writers and readers, so that at any point
in time, reading a classical text amounts to reading (considering, knowing,
assuming, more or less consciously) what post-classical reception has made
of that text, reading through reception as we constitute our own
receptions. The very breadth of what “Reception” entails (imitating,
interpreting, re-writing, translating, assimilating, revising…) can be a
problem, and explains the appeal of Jaussian Rezeptionsästhetik, which is
of course primarily (simply) a theory of “reading.” At bottom is the
truism formulated here by William Batstone, paraphrasing Martindale (1993),
“All meaning is constituted or actualized at the point of reception”
(p. 14). As with Reader-Response theories in general, emphasis shifts from
(authoritative) text to reader under this construction, not (explicitly) in
most of these essays to hijack the text’s intended meanings, but in
service of the notion that whatever a text’s recoverable intended
meanings are, they cannot be read in innocence, that is, apart from a
reader’s dispositions, understandings of the world and (limited)
knowledge. The reader’s mentality, her epistemological situation, has
become known, through Jauss, as her Erwartungshorizont, her “horizon of
expectations” against which she perceives the foregrounded work. One’s
horizon is both personal (an Iserian stress) and shared with others of
one’s time and situation, and this latter aspect, reception in history,
is largely, though not exclusively, the focus of this book’s essays.

The chapters here, framed by a bracing introduction by Martindale, a jaunty
“provocation” by Will Batstone, and a briefly resuming “afterword”
by Duncan Kennedy, are broken into two major sections, “Reception in
Theory” and “Studies in Reception.” The “theory” contributions
are not meant to be comprehensive; rather, they offer (not equally
persuasive) theoretical takes on specific problems: Ralph Hexter unpacks
the complexities of the reception-history of even a single author, in this
case Ovid; Timothy Saunders points out difficulties with reception
criticism’s “practice of exemplarity” (p. 32) and (limited) sense of
dialogue between text and reception; Kenneth Haynes wades deep into the
hermeneutic debates between Gadamer and Habermas on the factors determining
a text’s meaning, then into another, related dispute, between Peter Winch
and others, on the evidence for transcultural human rationality; Genevieve
Lively examines third wave or “post-”feminism in the context of factors
that also influence Reception studies (“a postfeminist hermeneutics …
willing and able to reflect upon the historicality of its position” [p.
66]); Craig Kallendorf comments on allusion as reception in Milton and
Vergil; Vanda Zajko considers how the Freudian psychoanalytic conception of
“identification” maps out certain kind of reception, both within texts
and between text and reader; Mathilde Skoie takes her cue from Iser’s
comment that “pastoral poetry unfolds itself as a process of reception
which gains its own history from its continual reworking of the pastoral
world,” and develops the notion in respect to Boileau and post-classical
pastoral; Tim Whitmarsh invokes Bakhtin in calling for a reinvigorated
consciousness of history, a “pragmatic historicism” in reception
studies; Miriam Leonard rereads Derrida (after Martindale), to show how
deeply the Derridean reading of Hegel’s take on Antigone is imbedded in
real history and politics; finally, Katie Fleming considers our own
problematic receptions of 20th-century fascist reception of the classics.

The book’s second section offers a selection of focused “Studies in
Reception,” and readers will find a wide range of work, though a few
pieces, like Alexandra Lianeri’s intriguing meditation, via Homer, on
translation and “the classic’s” historical isolation, might have been
better suited to the first section of the volume. Richard Thomas is more
topical as he traces the fascinating gender and “morality” negotiations
of 19th-century English reception of Horace’s Odes. James Porter’s
discussion of the (modern) historicity of Foucault’s “technologies of
the self” and the very different focus of Siobhán McElduff’s survey of
non-elite classical reception in Ireland share an interest in the ways
current conditions situate classical works. Helen Kaufmann turns to Derek
Walcott’s Omeros to illustrate how various “colonizing” (and
therefore failed) readings of the character Helen might modulate to a more
successful “decolonizing” perception. Colonization gets another look in
Lorna Hardwick’s treatment of a number of “disaporic” adaptations of
Greek drama. Considering drama again, Pantelis Michelakis looks at
performance as a mode of reception. The final chapters treat art: Elizabeth
Prettejohn covers a number of later versions of the Venus de Milo; Simon
Goldhill reads Victorian readings of Alma-Tadema’s Sappho and Alcaeus and
other paintings enfiguring “desire” and sexual tension; while John
Henderson in a characteristically zesty account returns to familiar ground,
Plato’s Symposium, via Anselm Feuerbach’s Das Gastmahl des
Platon—just the sort of out of the way reception to trigger remarkable
insights. The best of this superb collection of essays do just this,
showing us how reception re-casts imaginative light, illuminating all
around.

DANIEL M. HOOLEY
University of Missouri, Columbia


If you have been forwarded this review, you may subscribe to the listserv
by sending an email to: [log in to unmask]
Leave the subject line blank, and in the first line of the message write:
SUBSCRIBE CJ-Online

You may remove yourself from the CJ-Online listserv by sending an email to:
[log in to unmask]
Leave the subject line blank, and in the first line of the message write:
UNSUBSCRIBE CJ-Online

ATOM RSS1 RSS2