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to take another example, is a venerable, indeed ancient, way of dealing with literary texts, from Aristotle through Schleiermacher and Boekh;2 as reformulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer and others, it may invoke Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, and psychoanalytical perspectives just as easily as it once deployed allegory and symbolism, or the more conventional triad of philology, history and philosophy. |
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How valid or, more importantly, how valuable or illuminating, these different theories, perspectives, and methods are for the study of classical literature or culture is still, not surprisingly in view of the conceptual confusions, a matter of some dispute (benevolent or hostile) among classical scholars themselves. |
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The discipline of Classics, as academically defined, comprehends the total study of the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome, not least their transmitted texts and their influence on later vernacular literatures; it may also be extended to their interactions, historical and literary, with contiguous areas, the provinces of other disciplines, such as Biblical Studies and Egyptology. The investigation of these cultures, and the study, often with important pedagogical, not to say ideological, implications, of their literary heritage, has in the past made profitable use of other disciplines. Indeed it is sometimes claimed that it is at the points of intersection with other disciplines that classics has recently made most progress, or at least has generated the liveliest debate. The utility of, say, archaeology for our general knowledge of the ancient world was accepted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although not without some opposition. Similarly, although classical Luddites may still be encountered, few would dispute the contributions made, even to purely philological studies, by the great computerized Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (and its Latin parerga). This in turn was a small part of the computer revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, which has been compared variously to the introduction of the alphabet, the substitution of the codex for the papyrus roll, and the invention of printing. |
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Yet it is to the more controversial comparative investigation of other cultures, to anthropology, in short, and its effects on classical studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that we should look for a more suitable analogy to the present situation in the study of the classical literatures. It is not unreasonable to see in the work of the so-called Cambridge school of Sir James Frazer, J.E. Harrison, A.B. Cook, and F.M. |
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2 For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hermeneutics and its connection with Biblical exegesis as well as the interpretation of key classical texts, see Laks and Neschke (1990); an introduction to later developments is offered by Mueller-Volmer (1989). For the rejection of the method by pure "philologists" such as Hermann, and the consequences for classical studies, see Selden (1990) 158. For the application of modern hermeneutics to classical texts, see e.g. Kresic (1981), Benjamin (1988) and Galinsky (1992). |
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