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literature.10 Not much later Structuralist critical theory in all its many forms seemed in turn to yield before the onslaught of a more sceptical "poststructuralist" approach to language and literature, an approach based on different "epistemological" deductions from Saussurian semiotics. This sceptical perspective was given the omnium gatherum title, Poststructuralist Theory, and referred to by its commonest shibboleth, Deconstruction.11 There would be even newer debates about Modernism and Postmodernism. Interestingly enough for the classicist, Deconstructionists too professed to base their insights or their aporiai on the close reading favoured by the New Critics, and (for different purposes) by philologists. |
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Not that the break between these different approaches seems all that abrupt for classicists attracted to them. The insightful examination of poetic closure by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1968), based on the methods of New Criticism, were easily assimilated by the Gallic nouvelle vague, specifically by Hamon (1975). It was later recommended as a useful approach to classical texts in Materiali e discussioni per l' analisi dei testi classici, the flagship of intertextuality (and narratology).12 At very least, the insistence of the New Critics on the autonomy of the literary work and the rejection of such biographical or psychological notions as "sincerity" surely prepared the way for the emphasis on the text as opposed to the artist. As often happened in imperial Rome, the relegation of the writer was but a prelude to the death of the author. |
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The apparently sweeping success of Deconstruction in English and Modern Language departments,13 where it became almost the paradigm of contemporary critical theory, would have its reverberations in certain classical circles, most noticeably and (some would say) appropriately in Cambridge, the home of the anthropological approach to Classics.14 |
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To summarize the methods (rather than the results) of the various writers who march under the banner, not always of their own chosing, of Deconstruction is no easy matter, although few would deny the challenge they presented to reigning assumptions and unexamined certainties, particularly about the independent existence of the text. The Deconstructionists however are now being challenged in their turn on personal, academic, philosophical, and political grounds by more ideological critics, who object to this overly sceptical, if not nihilistic, approach to literary interpretation, and the |
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10 Notably in the work of Barthes, Todorov, and Genette. For an early discussion, see Culler (1975). Some representative writings of these authors are listed in the bibliography s. v. |
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11 The most useful guides here are Lentriccia (1980), Culler (1982) and Goodheart (1984). For further objections, but also acknowledgement of its benefits, see Eagleton (1983) 127, Abrams (1989) 333; 397. |
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12 See Fowler (1989), who cites Hammon (1975) 495. |
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13 For an incisive survey of the history, see Bergonzi (1990). |
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14 See the bibliography s. v. Goldhill, Henderson and Wyke. |
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