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Risk and Responsibility: Ancient and Modern Dialogues on Interpretation

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Risk and Responsibility: Ancient and Modern Dialogues on Interpretation RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY: ANCIENT AND MODERN DIALOGUES ON INTERPRETATION by Michael Andrew Kicey A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in The University of Michigan 2010 Doctoral Committee: Professor Emeritus L. Ross Chambers, Co-Chair Professor James I. Porter, Co-Chair, University of California, Irvine Professor Vassilios Lambropoulos Professor Marjorie Levinson Professor Dean C. Hammer, Franklin & Marshall College © Michael Andrew Kicey 2010 For my parents ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the following individuals and institutions: To the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School, the College of Literature, Science, & the Arts, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, for providing me with funding and support vital to the progress of my research, including the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (2002-03), the LS&A Regents Fellowship (2003-04, 2006-7), the Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship (2008), and the Rackham One-Term Fellowship (2009). To the Sweetland Dissertation Writing Institute, for financial and practical support during the summer of 2009 when I was entering the crucial final stages of my writing, and to the fine friends and discerning readers I found there: Paul Barron, Bridget Guarasci, Korey Jackson, and Jennifer McFarlane-Harris. Your generosity, encouragement, and criticism could not have come at a better moment, and reading your challenging research pushed me to go further with my own. To all of my students past and present, but in particular: Michael Cromwell, Robert Glass, James Hammond, Chad Karty, Kenneth Koshorek, Priti Nemani, Caroline Ross, Sarah Silveri, and Ross Teach. I taught you about the past; you have taught me about the future. iii To the chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Yopie Prins, and to the departmental administrative staff, Paula Frank, Nancy Harris, and Sonia Schmerl. Not only have you fought hard for the advancement of my research in every conceivable way, but you have also taught me to maintain my sense of humor and my sense of human reality – which are, at last, the only possessions we need. To the members of my committee, Ross Chambers, Dean Hammer, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Marjorie Levinson, and James Porter. I could not have hoped for more insightful readers, relentless supporters, and faithful friends. Nothing I can say here could truly reflect what I owe to each of you. To my friends, Nicholas Theisen and Patty Keller. I would have counted myself fortunate to have known you both for a day, let alone these many years. To my sister, Laura Kicey, and to my parents, Peter and Diane Kicey, to whom this work is dedicated. You already know why. iv Table of Contents Dedication ........................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. vi INTRODUCTION: BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME ....................................................1 CHAPTER I – THE NOISE OF INTERPRETIVE TRAVEL IN SOPHOCLES' OEDIPUS TYRANNUS ................................................................................................31 CHAPTER II – SAY HELLO TO THE NEW: TRAGIC TECHNOLOGIES IN BRECHT'S EPIC THEATER ....................................................................................105 CHAPTER III – INTERMEZZO: THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER .......................194 CHAPTER IV – A RECKLESS VOICE OF CONSCIENCE: SOCRATES AT RISK IN PLATO'S APOLOGY .................................................................................................206 CHAPTER V – A STRANGE NEW FORM OF LIFE: THINKING, ACTING, AND ENDANGERMENT IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT .......................300 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................370 v ABSTRACT This dissertation intervenes in debates about the ethics and politics of interpretation by articulating a phenomenology of the interpretive process rooted in the concepts of risk, responsibility, error, and complicity. In order to consider how the interpreter incurs risks and responsibilities by participating in a conversation both with her object and with other interpreters, this dissertation explores how two modern authors, Brecht and Arendt, have interpreted and shaped the disparate legacies of two classical authors, Sophocles and Plato. The first chapter examines how Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus defines the power of interpretation as a power of mobility, and shows how the systematic disruption of locative language connected to Oedipus poetically expresses the risks and responsibilities of the interpreter as one who is perpetually “out of order.” Turning to the modernist revolt against classical drama, the second chapter uses Brecht's Life of Galileo (1938-39) and his theoretical writings to explore how Brecht's resolutely anti-tragic dramaturgy actually reinstates the risks and responsibilities of the tragic attitude towards interpretation on the level of historical time rather than cultural space. The third chapter returns to antiquity to trace the beginnings of the philosophical response to tragedy in Plato's Apology, where Socrates embraces the plurality and indeterminacy of vi interpretation by consciously cultivating these aspects of his literary voice. In the fourth chapter, Socrates' philosophical affirmation of risk is revived in the thinking of Hannah Arendt, in whose later writings both the life of thought and the life of action take on a distinctly Socratic cast in their common connection to a realm of phenomenal appearance inherently bound to interpretation. This shared form of life overcomes the traditional division between thought and action by affirming interpretive risk and responsibility as essential to a life that is properly human. This dissertation contributes to debates in classical reception studies, ancient and continental philosophy, and German and ancient Greek literature, as well as theories of tragedy and of its relationship to philosophy. Most importantly, it aims to give new impetus to conversations on the theory and practice of interpretation, the future of poststructuralism, and the future of the humanities. vii 1 INTRODUCTION BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME I. Two Turntables and a Microphone: Interpretation, Reception, and Risk So: what is interpretation good for, anyway? In the wake of the post-structuralist debates that have dominated scholarship in the humanities for the last twenty to thirty years in the United States, it has become a virtual non-starter to claim that there are ethical and political stakes attached to the activity of interpretation. Critics schooled in the post-structuralist mode have become extraordinarily sensitive to the many ways in which their chosen objects of study are produced by processes of interpretation that are entangled in every element of social, economic, and political history. By the very same token, furthermore, they have become perhaps even more extraordinarily sensitive to the comparable entanglements in which they themselves stand by virtue of existing within their respective authorizing institutions, disciplines, and discourses. Ethics and politics have loomed large as issues in these directions of research, in short, because these become immediate problems whenever and wherever the conditions of possibility for our actions and thoughts can no longer be taken for granted. This is as it must be. Debates about the ethical and political stakes of interpretation in many specific areas, however, have recently grown confused and sterile – and not merely because the 2 questions they address are inherently self-reflexive. We have reached a certain point of impasse because we lack a critical vocabulary for admitting and even affirming the perils of interpretation as a practical activity; we no longer have a common set of categories with which to describe the situation of interpretation in human life. True, most post- structuralist approaches to interpretation have explored how the ethical and political dangers that accompany the interpretive activity penetrate the entire experience of the subject as a thinking and acting being – even to the point of constituting subjectivity itself. Yet at the same time, precisely by uncovering the dangers, uncertainties, and complicities that lie in ambush for the interpreter, these critical approaches inevitably stop short of justifying or affirming interpretation itself. In short: while these modes of thinking have sharpened our awareness of the stakes attached to the activity of interpretation, they have proven incapable of defining and affirming the wager involved in every act of interpretation as something both necessary and central to human experience. We are left in a situation in which we embrace the idea that everything we know, feel, or think takes shape through a complex act of interpretation, but we simultaneously fear and flee the ethical and political web of entanglements dictated by interpretation as such. So: what is interpretation good for? There can be no definitive answer to such a question, but there can be a contingent and provisional one to match the historical and institutional circumstance
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