Classics and the Uses of Reception (review)

This, the first in a new series devoted to 'Classical Receptions', presents a varied array of approaches and topics within the ever-expanding industry of reception studies as practised in Classics departments in Britain and North America. The two editors are well known for their contributions in the field: Charles Martindale both for a series of invaluable single-authored and edited volumes on what used to be called the 'influence' of classical authors on later European literatures, and, after his turn to theory, for Redeeming the Text (1993), a radical and widely influential manifesto that proclaimed the necessity of reception theory for an understanding of how ancient (or any) texts are read: Rezeptionsgeschichte is not something separate from our reading of the ancient texts, or, in what has become something of a mantra, 'meaning is always realized at the point of reception'. Richard Thomas has used reception history rather differently, in the polemical and essentializing project of Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001), a learned and fascinating study arguing that a monolithic pro-Augustan (and for Thomas false) reading of the Aeneid is the result of something like a conspiracy on the part of the major players in the history of the poem's reception.

The dominant voice of the volume is very much Bristol, the institution of eight of the twenty-three contributors (and home to the very active Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition), with Cambridge as the second most important presence (counting both current and former staff and students). Most of the contributors were trained as classicists, and there is an implicit question as to the importance of classical reception studies for non-classicists. Do others take us seriously? Does anyone else really care? Classicists' own enthusiasm for reception studies clearly has something to do with the struggle for survival in an alarmingly presentist world. In his 'Introduction' Martindale bluntly exposes another aspect of the classicist's anxiety when he proposes: 'The principle [for the successful practiceof classical reception studies] needs to be this: research on, say, the Victorians must be credible to Victorianists as well as classicists.' Encouragingly, a number of recent reception projects have teams made up of both classicists and non-classicists, although Martindale's dream of a time when 'classics could again have a leading role among the humanities' is perhaps unlikely to be realized. Martindale views 'credibility' above all in terms of a willingness to theorize reception; at least as important is a competent familiarity with the scholarship on the later period. Some of the best essays in the volume wear their theory lightly, illuminating aspects of the history of reception while remaining fully alert to the dialectical and negotiable processes of what is involved in writing that history.

After an Introduction in which Martindale revisits the issues of his 1993 book in the light of developments in the intervening decade, followed by a 'Provocation' by William Batstone (a personal reflection on some of the main theorists invoked by the kind of reception studies exemplified here), the body of the volume is divided into two sections, 'Reception in theory' and 'Studies in reception'. In the first section Kenneth Haynes offers a technical intervention in the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Habermas. Derrida has been important for the exorcism of older positivisms from studies of 'influence'; Miriam Leonard uses Derrida's reading of (Hegel's reading of) Sophocles' Antigone to raise awareness of the historical conditioning of influential approaches to the understanding of the classical past, as exemplified in Nicole Loraux's exposure of the occluded politics in the late great Jean-Pierre Vernant's historical anthropology of ancient Greece. Leonard's aim overlaps with that of James Porter (in the second section), who reveals how ideas going back to the Enlightenment condition the cultural theory of Foucault, a figure as influential in Classics as in other disciplines. Katie Fleming contemplates the politics involved in what was both an embarrassment and...