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philologist's choice to avoid a discussion of the underpinnings of philology in a theory of language is a strategy to be comprehended within a continuing history of the profession. Adopting a feminist perspective on classics as a subject and as an institution will also always depend on or at least affect your (self-)positioning within the academy. |
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The third area of worry is also concerned with the discreteness of the theories allowed a voice here, and involves a more complex set of issues. On the one hand, such an approach may make it harder to see the necessary connections between fields: an adequate 20th-century feminist theory, for example, could hardly hope to avoid an engagement with psychoanalysis.2 On the other hand and to my mind more importantly such a strategy may also silence certain questions that link the various turns to theory, questions that concern authority, meaning and the nature of exemplification. For the exploration of the past from the present requires a scrupulous attention to the aims and procedures of producing meaning. Is a critic committed to uncovering an author's meaning? Or an ancient reader's meaning? Or what is tacit or unrecognized to an ancient reader/writer but can be seen by the outsider's gaze of the historical anthropologist? Or a meaning for the present to confirm or contest, inspire or threaten the modern? Can should these different approaches to meaning be kept separate? The very name, Classics, invokes the exemplary (and problematic) status of the past in an especially marked way. When a classicist claims to offer a Feminist (Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Traditional . . . whatever) reading of an ancient text, what gestures of appropriation, what commitments to what epistemological stances are being made or excluded? Marxism with Marx, Psychoanalysis with Freud (and Lacan), make clear appeals to an authority that is modern, to ground an engagement with the past. What is the status of such an appeal? Is it of a different kind from other (modern) readings or merely a more clearly articulated version of a process of appropriation necessarily enacted in reading the past from the present? When a classicist claims to offer a Feminist (etc.) reading, is he or she committed to a particular set of questions, either in the form of certain strategies or tools of analysis, or in the sense of excluding some forms of enquiry as invalid? Is he or she committed to a type of or even a particular answer to such questions as, for example, a mechanistic application of a theoretical model is sometimes used in a circular fashion to 'prove' or 'support' via literature the claims of the theory? The very format of individual papers analyzing discrete theories with exemplary readings may help conceal both that there are such prior, difficult and often unbroached questions linking the different theoretical enterprises, and also that the |
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2 See e.g. Butler (1990); Brennan (1989); Gallop (1982); Mitchell (1974). |
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