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Cornford, with its emphasis on the underlying ritual basis of myth,3 a foreshadowing of later work on classical culture that we accept with greater readiness. The Cambridge school at least ensured a more understanding audience for the widely differing insights of E.R. Dodds, J.-P. Vernant, M. Detienne, and W. Burkert.4 Anthropological fieldwork on oral cultures even added further dimensions to the long-debated Homeric Question, initiated by F.A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795). The work of the Parrys, père et fils, after much initial scepticism and with some remaining reservations, has been embraced by Homeric scholars for the new light they shed on the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey.5 |
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Indeed it was the discipline of anthropology again, at least in its Gallic manifestation in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), together with the new approach to structural linguistics and semiotics pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913), that introduced into classical studies the seminal ideas of Structuralism.6 Propp, notably in his Morphology of the Folk Tale (Russian original, 1928), while the work of other Russian formalists moved in the same direction. The structuralist approach was particularly well adapted to the study of myth and mythological narratives, but its influence would soon be felt in other areas of classical studies. |
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Fashions in critical theory and practice must seem to the classical philologist to be changing with bewildering rapidity in the second half of the twentieth century. The New Criticism of English and American poetry and prose was initially associated with I.A. Richards, and then with such scholar-poets as Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt, and with such journals as Hound and Horn and The Kenyon Review. It came to include (despite differences) Kenneth Burke in the U.S. and, in Britain, William Empson and |
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3 For recent re-evaluations of the work of this school, see Peacock (1988), Ackerman (1991) and Calder (1991). |
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4 See most recently Bremmer (1989). For some representative work by the authors mentioned, see the bibliography s. v. Strauss (1985) 67 has remarked: "more than a few studies of Greco-Roman antiquity have made a provocative and stimulating use of anthropological scholarship . . .and not only studies of ancient literature or religion, but of ancient history as well." For some suggestive insights into the relationship between anthropology and the classics, see Redfield (1991) 11, who points to the progression from Mommsen to Weber in Germany; Fustel de Coulanges to Durkheim in France; and to the English traditions centering on Frazer and Robertson Smith; for a discussion of the interrelation and the benefits, see Humphreys (1978) and Winkler (1990) 8. There is a relationship between Cambridge "myth criticism" and the archetypal criticism of literature to be found in Bodkin (1934), Wheelwright (1954; 1962) and Frye (1957); cf. n. 7 below. |
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5 Wolf's Prolegomena was recently republished; details are in the bibliography. For the Parrys' contribution to the study of Homer, see especially Parry (1971). |
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6 See, e.g. Pucci (1971) 103 for the influence of Structuralism in the Classics. The basic documents for Lévi-Strauss' methodology are still Structural Anthropology (1967) and The Savage Mind (1966). On Saussure, see most conveniently Culler (1986); for some criticisms of Saussurian theory, Lyons (1969) 56. |
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