Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Alexander Beecroft (bio) and Michael Gibbs Hill (bio) The “classics,” however we define them, have an even longer and more intensive history of being under siege than the humanities at large. The field first experienced a crisis in enrollment and hiring during the 1970s, and has in a larger sense been on the decline since the gradual retreat of Latin as a medium for intellectual communication beginning in the seventeenth century. In our age of anxiety over rapidly-evolving technology and ever-globalizing capital, it would be easy to think that the “classics” had continued their long slide into irrelevance, and that texts composed two or three thousand years ago, in languages no longer spoken, would have ceased to exert any special kind of pull on intellectual life. The essays in this special issue demonstrate spectacularly how far the reality is from that gloomy hypothetical picture. Our five contributors explore the reception of “classics,” both Chinese and Western, in both China and the West, with a special focus on the past fifty years or so. That era has seen profound changes in how the classics are deployed in both regions, but our contributors show how ancient texts remain profoundly significant to contemporary political and aesthetic questions—in ways both constructive and harmful. In China, the past fifty years encompasses the period since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), an era in which the study of the ancient past, like most forms of scholarly practice, was dangerous, even impossible, to pursue. The time period encompasses also the period of intellectual openness and ferment between 1976 and 1989, as well as the economic and nationalist resurgence of the past two decades. Both Western and Chinese classical texts experienced changing roles throughout this period of transformation, and today debates about these texts (as our contributors show) are frequently touchstones for a variety of questions of urgent relevance: the relationship between modernization and Westernization; the relevance of liberal or democratic values in the Chinese context; the relative importance of enabling economic and social development versus the need for public order. In the West, the study of the classics has been transformed in the past few decades by the turn to reception studies, to an interest in what the classics have meant to centuries of readers, rather than what they may or may not have meant to an imagined and unattainable “original” audience. While the essays in this volume all participate in some [End Page 1] way in this field of reception studies, they take a variety of perspectives on its development: from celebrating the aleatory hermeneutic possibilities opened up by the downplaying of the “original” meaning of a source text to notes of caution about the dangers a too-rigid insistence on reception history as the only history might leave us prey to. These essays, drawn from a conference held February 27-March 1, 2014, and cosponsored by the University of South Carolina and by Beijing Language and Culture University, do not attempt to offer a unitary narrative, or a singular answer to the questions raised by the study of reception. Rather, and as the brief survey below demonstrates, they demonstrate the range and diversity of such answers, while challenging several currently-popular trends in classical reception, east and west. Zhang Longxi’s essay is a thoughtful meditation on, and provocative critique of, the methodology of reception studies as practiced in the study of the “classics,” however construed, in both China and the west. Zhang grounds his analysis in a careful reading of the debts reception studies owe to Hans Robert Jauss, and of the complex relationship between Jauss’ philosophy of literary history and the Gadamerian “fusion of horizons.” Through this theoretical intervention, Zhang argues for a corrective rebalancing of our current focus on reception history and Rezeptionsästhetik, towards a greater appreciation of the Gademerian horizons of the “classic” itself, and on Gadamer’s understanding of the “timelessness” of a classic as a mode of historical being. Like a number of the contributors to this issue, Zhang draws our attention in particular to the work of recent Chinese intellectuals such as Liu Xiaofeng (1956-) and Gan Yang (1952-), and uses...