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forms of surrogacy have been much explored in recent criticism, and their impact on the interpretation of some works most obviously Ovid has been considerable. Interpreters of Roman poetry in particular have become increasingly sensitized to the notion that the terms of the Callimachean aesthetic code continually violate the boundaries of the aesthetic and contaminate the whole field of discourse, from ethics to politics. Don't try to be innocently big or small in recent criticism: don't try crossing rivers, moving along paths, holding spears or drinking water. Quidquid agunt homines can be seen in terms of poetics: there is nothing but surrogacy. |
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Some people have welcomed these moves as ways of removing literature from the sphere of ideology, of getting us back to 'literary criticism'. Thank God for Callimachus. Others however have resisted these attempts to see poetry as everywhere about poetry. Poetry for them is not a game, not self-reflexive self-abuse: it's about real things, Life with a capital letter. No mise-en-abyme please, we're British. But the most productive criticism of ancient literature, especially Latin, has concerned itself precisely with the negotiation of the interactions between aesthetics and the 'real world': the word at war, in the phrase of John Henderson, who has done more than anyone else to make us take the politics of aesthetics seriously. Surrogacy cannot be restricted to a one-way process. Seeing the world in terms of poetics, of readers, works, and poets, inevitably involves seeing the components of fictional creation in terms of the world. In contaminating the field of discourse, poetics becomes itself contaminated by ideology. In the particular case of the criticism of Latin literature, the Callimachean code becomes politicised, and works like Ovid's amatory poems or Fasti48 become 'political' poetry just as much as the Aeneid. |
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If Romantic Irony takes its beginning from the reader's recognition that the artist has 'made it all up', the ideological reading of aesthetics stresses the lack of innocence in that making. But irony has to reenter the picture when we scrutinise this ideological reading itself. What is its foundation? The fashionable political reading of poetics tends to be vague about how it is grounded. Is this the way authors and readers are supposed to have seen it in antiquity? The 'right' way to read the texts, sub specie aeternitatis? The 'right' way for us in our present historical situation? The view endorsed by an interpretative community which is in some way privileged? Or just another way to read? I began by offering hope to traditionally inclined humanist critics that maybe they could be brought to feel happy with the loss of foundations, but the urgency is the same for cultural materialists or new historicists. If there are no foundations, there are no foundations. The critic has to be aware not just that the work before her is a human construct, but that her readings of it, however sophisticated and however ideologically |
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48 See especially Wallace-Hadrill (1987), Hinds (1992) and Feeney (1992), with Fowler (1992) on Feeney (1991). |
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