Curricular reform is needed: why not make reception a field requirement for all matriculating classicists? A doctoral thesis on reception would not typically be considered a ticket to a job in the profession, at least in the States - if anything, quite the contrary. Nor do most Classics departments have designated positions for specialists in reception. With publishing outlets increasingly guaranteed, there should be no fears about tenurability and promotion. No doubt the greatest hesitation to date has been over the mission or ‘core’ of classical studies. Another is criterial. Standards of rigour in reception are far from established. And how do you test somebody’s skill set in reception anyway? There are no datives or supines in reception studies, and the boundaries are potentially limitless, even of the critically conceived variety of reception studies. Supposing that reception studies has an obvious place in the academy, it is unclear where that place should be. In Classics departments? In modern languages? Comparative Literature? Or in History?
Criteria of ‘relevance’ aside, teaching reception has all the same benefits as reception studies have on their own: it demonstrates the situatedness and contingencies of Greek and Roman studies. An all too common assumption within Classics departments is that Classics has the prestige and responsibility, if not always the clout, to commandeer (to be synonymous with) liberal education and to draw students in for that reason: ‘classical tradition’ is a ticket to value, if not to a job. This is highly questionable. What really attracts students is their hunch that there is indeed some cachet to Classics, which they vaguely feel the pulls of, and also that they want proof of the claim, not the claim itself. Rather than resting on this assumption, why not explore alternatives? A critical, open-minded approach to problems of canonization, classicality and the ways in which Classics became ‘Classics,’ can be a powerful and seductive invitation to the study of how knowledge works in culture and society (Lianeri and Zajko 2008). Critical thinking and classical education in this way go hand in hand. One need not take the ‘greatness’ of the classical past for granted. One can instead ask how this claim to distinction came into existence and evolved, how it was sustained, transformed, questioned, perverted and so on. In this way, the concept of ‘the classical’ can receive some real substantive content: it can appear at the end of the curriculum as what was covered, however battered, bloodied, and wobbly it may be, not as the shining Thing one was after from the start. Recall that homerizein (to Homerize) in Greek means ‘to lie’ - and other things less reputable (‘to indulge one’s natural lust’ is found in a late novelist). It never hurts to start reception classes off with such disclosures.
A further pressing issue concerns the problem of training. While study of the reception of the Greek and Roman world is widespread and belongs to no one in particular, Greek and Roman reception studies are increasingly initiated by professing classicists, which raises the interesting question of what differences if any exist between reception studies carried out, as it were, from within the fold and those carried out by scholars who lack training let alone background in the postclassical target-fields of reception studies? Baldly put, the question is whether a nonclassicist can competently conduct the history of Classics’ reception. The flip-side of this is the question of what justifies a classicist’s pretensions to knowledge about the reception of Greek and Roman material in other historical contexts and subject areas. Classicists who undertake reception studies are not only putting themselves out on a limb professionally. They are often obliged to reach well beyond their training - which is not inherently a bad thing, though it does make one want to ask once more why reception should fall outside of the professional training of classicists. A reverse argument might be that reception studies can be conducted without knowledge of Greek and Latin, let alone knowledge of the original Greek and Roman traditions in wearying detail, because reception begins (frequently) after those civilizations have collapsed. Why should someone studying the connections between Byron, Keats, or Goethe and Greco-Roman antiquity trouble herself with the philology of Aeschylus or Livy? Even if the premise behind the question is false or debatable, this does not meant that excellent work in reception should always require specialist philological expertise or detailed knowledge of the historical conditions and production of the source work, just as much reception has often been inspired by the Classics without being stricto sensu informed by them. Behind everything lies the problem of integration: how do all these bits of the puzzle fit together (assuming they should)?
World History
