Classical Reception for Modernists: An Update

Abstract

Classical Reception for Modernists:An Update Meryl Altman The Classics in Modernist Translation. Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 264. $130.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $35.95 (eBook). Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy. Nancy Worman. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 168. $120.00 (cloth); $40.95 (paper); $36.85 (eBook). Over the last several decades, the field of Classical Studies has seen an exciting renaissance under the rubric of "Classical Reception." The two books I'm reviewing belong to an explosion of work—handbooks, companions, themed conferences, anthologies, book series—which often feature partnerships between classicists and literary scholars (or sometimes historians) who specialize in one or another later period or place. No longer considered a dowdy second-best younger sister, or sidelined as embarrassingly subjective and presentist, "reception" is now taught at Oxford and Cambridge, and is a section of the Society for Classical Studies (formerly the APA). Translation studies forms one important strand within this field of inquiry; another is the study of performance. The movement toward "reception" has been accompanied by an intentional critique of the field's elitist biases—often referred to by the shorthand term "classics so white"—and by a departure from the hegemonic notion of Greece (especially Athens) and Rome as the great Western tradition that later writers struggled to live up to. For classicists who turn their attention to reception, this does not mean abandoning philological rigor. But philology becomes expansive rather than restrictive; having good Greek (and/or Latin) still matters, but it is not the only thing that does. Even the (wildly misconstrued) decision of the Princeton classics faculty to decenter traditional language study could be understood as an echo of this promising openness to new approaches and new ideas. So what might the new(ish) classical reception studies have to offer specifically to the study of twentieth-century literature, and to the subdiscipline (or perhaps I mean "institution") of modernist studies, as represented by this and similar journals? Several essays in Miranda [End Page 901] Hickman and Lynn Kozak's anthology, The Classics in Modernist Literature, pose the question directly; Nancy Worman, a well-respected classicist herself, approaches it more obliquely in Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy, with a particular emphasis on feminist developments. My answer is that we can learn quite a bit from classical reception, not just from the particular knowledges it brings forward, but also from its methodology and its ideological stances. While capsule summaries of what "classical reception" now means are provided in Eileen Gregory's "H.D. and Euripides: Ghostly Summoning" and Annett K. Jessop's "'Untranslatable' Women: Laura Riding's Classical Modernist Fiction" in the Hickman and Koszak collection, I would advise readers seeking a general orientation to the field to begin elsewhere. A good introduction to the theory at work is Lorna Hardwick's Reception Studies, and a generous sampling of its best practices is the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by Hardwick and Christopher Stray, who describe their eclectic principle of selection as "cheerfully and creatively anarchic."1 A range of thoughtful and deeply researched pieces fulfill the underlying aim: to show us something new about both the ancient and the modern, to shed new light on both. The field's inaugural insight and abiding touchstone—Charles Martindale's observation that "meaning is realized at the point of reception"—ideally leads scholars to reflect on their own affective investments in what they study, rather than seeking to mask them.2 Just as translation studies moves us away from assessing whether translations "correctly" or faithfully represent a source text in a target language—it's more complicated than that, as Walter Benjamin, and then Lawrence Venuti, have explained—reception studies asks us to replace censorious evaluations about "who got it right" with the understanding that all texts speak to and through other writers, in conscious and unconscious ways, always have and always will, and to see what we can see. Reception studies leads classicists to broaden both the methodological toolkit and the textual canon. Hardwick calls for a "broader cultural philology" (Reception Studies, 10) pointing out that hate and love are both forms of reception, and...