Introduction

This special issue of Arethusa shares the first part of its title with our Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, published by Routledge in 1997. It resembles Compromising Traditions in certain other ways as well. Five of the essays in that volume were originally delivered as papers for a panel on the personal voice in classical scholarship, organized by Thomas Van Nortwick and me, at the 1994 meeting of the American Philological Association. Two of the others were first presented as papers at a revised version of this same panel that took place at the meeting of the British Classical Association the following spring. So, too, most of the essays in this issue began their lives as papers and responses that were presented at two sessions--in 1995 and 1996 respectively--of a three-year APA colloquium that we chartered in response to the enthusiasm engendered by our 1994 panel. One of these sessions was centered on the personal voice in Latin, the other on the personal voice in Greek literary scholarship.

Like those who contributed essays to the Routledge volume, the scholars whose essays appear in this special issue represent diverse and distinctive perspectives on the study and teaching of classical antiquity. There are, of course, some key demographic differences as well, Most obviously, all seven of our authors are currently based here in North America, whereas four of the contributors to Compromising Traditions taught at British universities. The majority of our contributors would identify themselves as Hellenists, whereas our 1997 volume was populated by a large contingent of Latinists.

Two of those writing in this issue, however, note in their essays that they emigrated from other countries. Indeed, one of them calls attention to her background as the child of refugee parents who had survived the Nazi Holocaust, portraying it as a significant factor in her decision to pursue graduate work in our discipline. More important, our contributors are, once again, males and females, gays and "hets," Jews and Christians, ranging widely in both their ages and their professional circumstances. Among them, for example, is a young woman completing her graduate work at the University of Texas who, for the past few years, has been employed at the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Yet they also include two men who have recently retired from distinguished teaching careers in classics graduate programs at other public institutions, one in Canada and the other in New York City. Two are faculty members at small, private liberal arts colleges. Two teach in comparative literature and humanities--rather than "straight classics"--departments. Another writes about her professional challenges as a joint appointee in the theater department of her college at an innovative campus of the University of California.

In the "Introduction" to Compromising Traditions, we offered a fairly general definition of writing in the personal voice, as, in the words of Nancy Miller, an "explicitly autobiographical performance within the act of criticism." Admittedly, we situated this mode of self-expression in a larger intellectual framework, linking it closely to developments in feminist and post-structuralist scholarly analysis and providing a "genealogy" of its appearances in our own field of classical scholarship. But we merely stressed its unorthodox use of the first person and its open acknowledgment of relationships: in particular, the relationships between what we classicists do outside of the library and classroom and what we choose to investigate and emphasize in our roles as researchers and educators.

In distinguishing the use of the personal voice from traditional scholarly and professional discourse in classical scholarship, we did little more than suggest what personal voice criticism has the capacity to include--both in its style and its content. For the most part, we allowed the individual essays themselves to illustrate the many ways in which such criticism can make, and recognize, connections between the fruits of our research and topics that are usually off-limits in scholarly exposition. At the same time, a number of these essays sought to problematize this approach through autobiographical as well as theoretical musings.

The essays...