|
|
|
|
|
|
|
social pressures. Such an approach, evaluating the documentable influences of classical works on later writings rather than the postulated effects on their readership, has never lacked its defenders and practitioners. It therefore continues to provide a less systematic form of Rezeptionstheorie.28 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Finally there is the unavoidable, if often disguised, problem that bulks large in any discussion of critical theories of literature (ancient as well as modern). This is the specifically extrinsic dimension of literature, the "World", in all its contemporary, historical, ethical, aesthetic, or even metaphysical dimensions. This Other sits at the table, as it were, along with the other players: the author, the text, and the reader. However this Other is constituted, as the objectively real (physical or metaphysical everything that is the case) or the sometimes subjective, sometimes objective, ethical and aesthetic universe, its claims are pressing, although they can be (and are) resisted. (In ancient critical theory both of these objective and subjective aspects were subsumed in the theories of "mimesis"; artistic "imitation" reflected both the external physical world and the ethical world of human life and conduct.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The relationship of literature to the world of facts, introspection or action has been the disputed province of numerous theorists: from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and latterly Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan. These larger theories, which are as much "sociological" as metaphysical, like those based on religion and "morality" (sacred or profane), tend to scrutinize civilization and culture as a whole, not just literature and art. Their broader purview, however, does not ipso facto negate their potential contributions to the understanding and evaluation of classical literature, even if, for example, Marxist and neo-Marxist theory has been (illogically) discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of its satellites.29 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
To take one example, contemporary feminist theory may alienate some philologists because, like Marxism, it has a decidedly activist side to it.30 One of its prime aims, in examining Greco-Roman civilization as a whole, or classical literature in particular, is to reclaim women's past from its |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
28 The basic texts are Pound's "Notes on Elizabethan Classicists", "Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer", conveniently reprinted in Pound (1954) 227, 249; Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent in Eliot" and "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation" in Eliot (1951) 13, 65. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
29 For Marxist theory and the Classics, see e.g. Arethusa (1985). For a useful introduction to the whole subject, see Eagleton (1976) and Williams (1977). For a sample of the literary comments of Marx and Engels, see Baxandall and Morawski (1973). For a recent analysis of aspects of Greek literature along Marxist lines, see Rose (1992). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
30 See e.g. Richlin (1991) on the potential of feminist theory to empower women in the present, not least in academe and in classical studies in particular. Good introductions to feminist theory are Showalter (1986) 317 and Tong (1990); for its application to classical studies, see Keuls (1985), Cantarella (1987) and Richlin (1992). |
|
|
|
|
|