Introduction: Classical Philology, Otherhow

Abstract

Introduction:Classical Philology, Otherhow Emily Greenwood Philology is restless. It travels in the wake of the languages that are its subject, object, and medium, it travels as history moves, and it travels with theory.1 Sometimes, as Victor Klemperer put it, it goes into exile.2 Our branch of philology, classical philology, also shifts as part of the larger "diasporic and dynamic condition of classics."3 This two-part special issue is a field report from some of the less documented travels of classical philology in the United States. In a journal founded by Basil Gildersleeve, the itinerary covered here might seem wayward, if only because of the monocultural horizons that Gildersleeve set for American classical philology.4 The version of classical philology explored in this project aims [End Page 187] to be omni-American in its horizons.5 The works included in this volume represent trends in the study of Classics typically associated with classical reception studies and cultural studies, presented here as part of, not apart from, classical philology. The context for this special issue is the expansion of the journal's purview, set out by its editor in March 2019, in recognition of the historical situatedness of classical philology in North America and the veil of ignorance that descends in pretending otherwise.6 Following this reimagining of the scope of AJP, in the past two years the journal has featured a series of guest editorials whose authors have encouraged the wider disciplinary community to think more self-critically and ambitiously about what an expanded field of classical philology might look like.7 This special issue takes up this theme, exploring what it might mean to do classical philology "otherhow," to use Rachel Blau DuPlessis' adverb. DuPlessis coined this word, initially the title of a poetic essay, as a way of disrupting the norms of representing women's gender in poetry, remarking, "Many poems look too much alike. They sometimes act and sound alike. They repeat. They repeat the relations and they repeat the exclusions. They repeat the satisfactions."8 In using the term "otherhow" I want both to invoke DuPlessis' critique of unreflective traditions, and to use this unsettled word to reflect on philology's other. Too often the discussions about diversifying classical philology paradoxically retrace its boundaries, by approaching philology otherhow as an exercise in disciplinary inclusion, in which a field relaxes its border controls to let in scholars from under-represented backgrounds with overlapping interests in different interpretative traditions.9 We could [End Page 188] call this diversity as ethnographic fallacy. Instead, following Nathaniel Mackey, we ought rather to attend to our role in constructing the cultural identity of classical philology and in othering cultural approaches and work that we do not recognize as part of this tradition. As Mackey wrote in the seminal article "Other: From Noun to Verb," "We need instead to highlight the dynamics of agency and attribution by way of which otherness is brought about and maintained, the fact that other is something people do, more importantly a verb than an adjective or a noun."10 Recent metacritical and pataphilological discussions have rightly foregrounded these questions of agency and responsibility in the orientation of classical philology and there have been excellent studies of the rhetorical structures and habitus of classical philologists in classical reception studies.11 In turn, this work echoes a metacritical turn in comparative philologies, most notably Sheldon Pollock's articulation of Philology as "the critical self-reflection of language" and "as the language of the book of human being."12 But, as Gayatri Spivak has asked of the field of Comparative Literature, "Who slips into the place of the 'human' of 'humanism' at the end of the day?" (2003). Why do some cultural references fly in classical philology and others sink or offend, what cultural norms prescribe what is or not germane to classical philology and classical scholarship tout court and how do these cultural norms relate to the somatic norms of the discipline? Dan-el Padilla Peralta spelled out all this and more in his trenchant blogpost in January 2019.13 In classical philology we are simultaneously in at the ground floor of western humanism and...