Reception Studies: the Cultural Mobility of Classics

Reception Studies: The Cultural Mobility of Classics Emily Greenwood Abstract: In spite of connotations of classics and the classical as an established tradition based around a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/41/1830910/daed_a_00374.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 stable canon, Greek and Roman classical antiquity has never been a fixed object of study. It has changed as our knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome has grown and shifted, and as a function of history, intel- lectual movements, and taste. Classicists have turned to classical reception studies in an attempt to chart some of the different encounters that various historical audiences have had with Greek and Roman classics, and this wave of research poses interdisciplinary questions about the relation of Greek and Roman classics to world literatures and cultures. The emphasis on classical reception studies offers fresh ways of thinking about the cultural mobility of the classics without appealing to discredited, old-fashioned notions of “timeless importance” or “universal value.” This debate is explored here via a Malawian reception of Sophocles’s Antigone. By its very name, the term classics proclaims that a select body of works from antiquity is perpetually new. Here I am thinking less of Ezra Pound’s dictum in ABC of Reading that “literature is news that stays new,” and instead of a remark made by Plutarch, a polymath from Boeotia in central Greece and a subject of the Roman empire.1 In his Life of Pericles, written early in the second century ce, Plutarch writes admiringly of the architecture of the buildings on the Athenian Acropolis, built in the third quarter of the fifth centurybce . For Plutarch, the striking quality of these buildings was that, at the time of EMILY GREENWOOD is Profes- construction, they were instantly antique, and yet in sor of Classics in the Department Plutarch’s day (over five hundred years later) they of Classics at Yale University. She remained fresh and new. is the author of Afro-Greeks: Dia- logues Between Anglophone Caribbean Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and Literature and Classics in the Twentieth at once antique [archaios]; but in the freshness of its Century (2010) and Thucydides and vigour it is, even to the present day, recent [prosphatos] the Shaping of History (2006). and newly wrought [neourgos]. Such is the bloom of per- © 2016 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00374 41 Reception petual newness [kainotēs], as it were, upon distrust in universals in contemporary lib- Studies: these works of his, which makes them ever eral thought. The Cultural Mobility to look untouched by time, as though the un- For much of the research and teaching of Classics faltering breath of an ageless spirit had been transacted within departments of classics, infused into them.2 the ideological overtones of classics and the (Plutarch Life of Pericles 13.3, classical are an extraneous concern; classi- trans. Bernadotte Perrin) cists know what they study (the languag- es, history, literature, art, archaeology, and All of us in the academy would like to thought–including philosophy and sci- claim the bloom of perpetual newness for ence–of ancient Greece, Rome, and con- our disciplines. In the case of classics, this tiguous civilizations in the ancient Medi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/41/1830910/daed_a_00374.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 old-newness is written into our self-nam- terranean) and are not interested in claim- ing, with classics and the classical shorthand ing universal relevance or reach for their for a complex process of classicization that subject. On the contrary, the palaeograph- has gone into defining the transcultural ical, linguistic, philological, historical, and and transhistorical value of works from archaeological skills that are at the core of Greek and Roman antiquity. research and pedagogy in classics are deep- As a heavily freighted value system, clas- ly historicizing and pull against a univer- sics is not always an ideal vehicle for en- salizing impulse. But academic disciplines suring the continued study of the cultures do not always get to define themselves and of ancient Greece and Rome. Instead, be- are subject to something of a time-lag as far cause of the antiquity of the works that as external perceptions go. In recent years, it signifies, its perceived entwinement classicists have responded by tackling any with formations such as “Western Civili- image problems head-on: the 2009 cre- zation,” “Europe,” or “Eurochronology,” ation in the United Kingdom of a flour- and because of the elitism written into ishing charity entitled “Classics for All” its very nomenclature, from the outside, counters the assumption that classics is the classics strikes many across the globe as preserve of a narrow elite; meanwhile, the at best moribund and at worst a bastion erstwhile American Philological Associa- of European cultural chauvinism. What tion, founded in 1869, changed its name in is classical is what is judged first-rate, and 2014 to the more accessible “Society for this judgment presupposes a single scale Classical Studies.”3 of value, since works can only be ranked in terms of excellence and lasting value if These outreach efforts have been accom- they are all measured on the same scale. panied by the growth of classical reception And if the classics of ancient Greece and studies. Classicists have long studied the Rome have a prior monopoly on what is afterlives of Greek and Roman authors, as classical, then classics appears to impose have scholars in other disciplines, but the its canon on all other areas of study and emergence of a concerted program study- artistic endeavour. The fact that canon is a ing the contextualized reception of clas- Greek noun in origin (kanōn: a rod, rule, sics and the history of classical scholar- standard), attested in ancient Greek liter- ship marks a shift away from a fixed and ary criticism to refer to authors who are hierarchical classical tradition, which em- exemplary and judged worthy of study phasized a single lineage traced through and preservation, does not help the case European culture to the present day, to an for classics in the academy, where the im- unruly, uncanonical, and unpredictable se- plicit universalism of classics falls foul of a ries of encounters and responses to Greek 42 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and Roman classics in diverse cultures and version of Antigone is local in the sense that Emily contexts. This development has in turn it adapted a body of myth, which had both Greenwood sparked new debates, revolving around local and trans-local dimensions, for an the question of how to study the far-reach- Athenian audience, at an Athenian dramat- ing cultural mobility of Greek and Roman ic festival in a specific historical, cultural, classics, which increasingly circulate in the political, and religious context.6 This lo- works of writers who do not identify them- cal drama then went on to have a very rich selves with “the classical tradition,” “the supra-local life in re-performance. West,” “European civilization,” or “clas- Critics of cosmopolitanism have object- sical humanism” without appealing to dis- ed that championing cosmopolitanism in 4 credited universals. literature and art downgrades the regional Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/41/1830910/daed_a_00374.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Latterly I have begun to use the com- and the local, instead elevating works with pound adjective omni-local, modeled on Al- a Western-oriented and “cosmopolitan” bert Murray’s term omni-American, to dis- literary reach that secures them transna- cuss the translatability, adaptability, and tional mobility. Along similar lines, ca- relationality of classics in different con- nonical literature and local literature are temporary cultures. As coined by Murray, frequently treated as mutually exclusive. the term omni-American referred to the Commenting on the experience of teach- “irrevocably composite” nature of mod- ing Sophocles’s Antigone alongside the Ar- ern American culture.5 In proposing the gentinean playwright Griselda Gambaro’s category of omni-local for Greek and Ro- Antígona furiosa (1985–1986) in a world lit- man classical texts that circulate widely in erature class, Jane Newman has remarked different historical and cultural contexts, I that her students were struck by the gulf want to evoke the idea that these “classics” between critical responses to the two are cultural composites that result from works: “canonical works are often read, successive readers and audiences encoun- well, canonically, as articulating universals, tering and making sense of these works. as opposed to how their successors are of- But the concept of omni-local classics ten read and perhaps also taught–that is, has other useful resonances. The omni-lo- as only local works.”7 Approaching a work cal substitutes a horizontal, two-way rela- like Sophocles’s Antigone as an omni-local tionship in place of a vertical, hierarchical classic obviates the traditional hierarchy tradition. In the context of classical recep- between the canonical and the local by tion studies, the focus on the local dimen- emphasizing the local embedded in the sions of classical adaptation applies equal- classical. ly to the classical “source” text, and re- One possible objection to this concept is minds us that in their original contexts the that a version of cosmopolitanism or uni- classics were themselves “local,” insofar as versalism is being reintroduced through they worked with, read, and received exist- the prefixomni , from the Latin adjective ing myths and other works. This is particu- omnis (all, every).

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