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bounded fantasies of its opponents with the solid truth. This rhetoric of presence is not unknown in more sophisticated and ideologically aware criticism. But such criticism may also more cautiously stop at the level of unmasking, at the revelation of the processes of the text and their political implications. One danger here is that we produce a negative rhetoric that can only be used up, that presupposes an Endzeit. Where do we go after we have seen ancient literature for the fraud and pretence it really is? |
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Another danger lies in the gulf that opens up between professional classicists and the subject in society. The popular image of antiquity is 'The Glory that was Greece, The Grandeur that was Rome', an image in which it is easy to acquiesce to pull in the money and the students. But our scholarly literature is all about revealing the backside of this sublimity, removing the props that hold up the shiny-white stage sets of Greece and Rome. This dissociation of sensiblity is unfortunate, but it is no good trying to recover lost innocence, to get back to a time before we knew what we were doing. Somehow we need to be able to acknowledge the absence of foundations but to carry on the tradition. We need Romantic Irony. |
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The ironist can acknowledge her own temporal grounding without feeling that this makes everything pointless. As with love, it is precisely because we are making it all up that we need to take our responsibilities so seriously: to argue, change our minds, take up new positions, teach and learn. The stories that we tell do not lose point: on the contrary, they have to become better ones if we are to get others to share the truths that we are inventing. In the end Romantic Irony is not a trope to be seen in a few classical poems, it is the only attitude towards antiquity that it is possible for us now to take. And that statement (like this) is as contingent as any other.52 |
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Adams R.M. (1958) Strains of Discord: Studies in Literary Openness (Ithaca: 1958). |
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Adkins A.W.H. (1985) Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists (Chicago and London: 1985). |
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Barthes R. (1979) A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, trans. R. Howard (London: 1979) from Fragments d'un discours amoureux (Paris: 1977). |
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Bishop L. (1989) Romantic Irony in French Literature: From Diderot to Beckett (Nashville: 1989). |
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Booth W.C. (1974) A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago-London: 1974). |
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Bourgeois F. (1974) L'ironie romantique (Paris: 1974). |
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Dane J.A. The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens-London: 1991). |
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Eco U. (1984) Postscript to the Name of the Rose (New York-London: 1984). |
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Feeney D.C. (1991) The Gods in Epic (Oxford: 1991). |
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52 I am grateful for comments to members of the London Institute of Classical Studies seminar on Greek Narrative, especially Nick Lowe and Michael Silk, and to Peta Fowler and Matthew Leigh: lovers of truth. |
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