|
|
|
|
|
|
|
zations, jumping agilely from a passage in one text to one in another, and then to others linked with one another only by their all belonging to the same generously defined period. Beneath the undeniable differences lay an unacknowledged similarity: both methods derived their impetus, their fascination, and their limitation from the determined refusal to attempt systematically to integrate with one another internal and external recontextualizations. Indeed, even in their preferred objects of study, polemic concealed consensus. Deconstruction and Derrida focused on the impossibility of authenticity, consciousness, and representation, to be sure, while New Historicism and Foucault pursued the themes of sexuality, power, and marginalization; but what fascinated both were the failed attempts to establish autonomy and control, the dissonances and ruptures within and between discourses, the crises of a subjectivity conceived not as individual but as general or social. Thus it was that those who were dissatisfied with what they considered Deconstruction's esoteric aestheticism could come to celebrate New Historicism's apparent commitment to political issues. Yet they would find the transition from the one school to the other made surprisingly painless by their underlying similarities. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Now that the wave of New Historicism has already crested in modern language studies, leaving the jetsam of Cultural Studies stranded on the shores of numerous English and Comparative Literature departments in the United States, it can be expected to begin to wash sooner or later upon Classics as well indeed, in the recent writings of a few remarkably prescient classical scholars, this has already happened.63 Such is the state of classical scholarship that this will bring not only disadvantages. Classics is still often burdened by an astonishingly unsophisticated view of the relation between ancient literature and ancient history; on the one side words, on the other things; on the one hand individual subjectivities and poetic refinements, on the other institutional constraints and the brutalities of power. Ancient historians are too often seen not as authors of one more problematic (and in many regards fictional) text, but as the immediate and transparent expression of the way things were, as purveyors of a self-evident historical truth which can then be used to resolve the challenges posed by literature; while ancient poets are too often examined only from the perspective of their connection to specific political events, as though the inevitable obscurity of such connections were the only or most interesting of the difficulties they pose. In this regard as in others, the wide-spread institutional division between departments of classical philology and departments of ancient history represents a betrayal of Wolf's ideal of "Altertumswissenschaft."64 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
63 Comparing Winkler (1985) and (1989) clearly reveals two stages in this transition. Some further examples are to be found in Selden and Hexter (1992). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
64 On the origins and meaning of this ideal, see Most (1993b). |
|
|
|
|
|