Lucan, Reception, Counter-history

This paper reads Foucault’s 1975-6 lecture series Society Must Be Defended. It argues that the notion of counter-history developed in these lectures depends on a particular construction of Rome, as that which counter-history counters. Foucault’s version of Rome in turn depends on a surprisingly conventional reading of two monumental histories (Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and Virgil’s Aeneid) as ‘the praise of Rome’. Reading Foucault’s work instead with Lucan’s Pharsalia renders visible a counter-history within Rome itself. This reading demonstrates the ways in which reception theory can usefully illuminate and supplement Foucauldian genealogy as a critical-historical method

Book Review: Kallendorf, Craig. The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture

The Other Virgil is introduced as a contribution to the debate within classical scholarship over the historicity of pessimistic readings of Virgil’s Aeneid. This debate might at first appear to be a minor intradisciplinary quarrel, but in fact it has important implications for reception study more broadly, raising questions about the historicity of reception (and reading in general) and about the validity of various contemporary methodological approaches to reception and allusion

Philology, or the art of befriending the text

This essay examines the 1960s/1970s\u27 transformation of the text as an object of reading, and argues for an equivalent transformation of philology as a practice of reading. I focus on the oscillation between reading as literacy (the capacity to recognize and decipher a given language) and reading as interpretation (the capacity to respond to the text). This oscillation itself results from an irreducible ambiguity in the text: both a stable verbal artifact with a determinable form and a bearer of indeterminate meaning. Reading Roland Barthes\u27s critique of philology and Ursula Le Guin\u27s science-fictional paean to its possibilities (\u27The Author of the Acacia Seeds\u27), I argue for a philological practice that resists, questions, and repositions the closure of the text

She\u27s Already Waited Too Long: Affective Transtemporality in Ben Ferriss\u27s Penelope

This essay investigates some ways in which affect is deployed in historical cinema to produce distinctive experiences of temporality. It argues that the experience of watching historical film is irreducibly and originarily asynchronous, and that affect - including emotion and mood - produces a circuit of attachment between the present time of viewing and the represented past. I contrast a mainstream cinematic retelling of Homer\u27s Iliad, Petersen\u27s Troy (2004), where emotion is used to repair temporal disjuncture, to Ferris\u27s more interesting Homeric film, Penelope (2009), which explores the experience of asynchrony itself, both through the subjective time of waiting and through an investigation of the timelessness of the classical

Slash as queer utopia

In Text, John Mowitt writes that textuality can be understood “in terms of the interplay between what takes place within a cultural production… and what, as yet, has no place within the social”. In this paper I will be trying to tease out the complicated topography produced by this interplay between what takes place and what has no place, in its specific relation to the utopic and queer spaces produced by slash fan fiction. I argue that Mowitt’s understanding of the text allows us to interrogate and to reframe the relationship between textuality and historical/social context (often metaphorized as ‘situatedness’, fixity, location). In this way we will be able to read the utopics of slash, not as the ‘no-place’ of a desire free from the constraints of the social, but as a model for politically and ethically responsible textuality

Preview Press the Escape key to close Modern Literary Theory and Ancient Texts. An Introduction

This short volume is designed to introduce classicists (mainly students of classical literature) to a range of twentieth-century theoretical approaches to the study of texts. Its best feature is S.’s unapologetic and palpable commitment both to theory, as the engine for producing new ways to frame and to explore crucial questions about literature, and to literary texts themselves. His conclusion, arguing that literary theory helps us perceive the ‘strangeness’ of classical texts and their provocations to ‘see the world from a strange perspective’ (p. 208), is passionate and convincing; the sections where he focusses on the application of modern theories to ancient texts are also strong, if rather few in number

Mum’s a silly fusspot”: the queering of family in Diana Wynne

In Four British Fantasists, Butler cites Diana Wynne Jones saying that her novels ‘provide a space where children can... walk round their problems and think “Mum’s a silly fusspot and I don’t need to be quite so enslaved by her notions”‘ (267). That is, as I will argue in this paper, Jones’ work aims to provide readers with the emotional, narrative and intellectual resources to achieve a critical distance from their families of origin. I will provide a brief survey of the treatment of family in Jones’ children’s books, with particular reference to Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Ogre Downstairs, Cart and Cwidder, Drowned Ammet, The Homeward Bounders and Hexwood, and then narrow my focus to two of Jones’ classic 4 treatments of family: Eight Days of Luke and Archer’s Goon. I will read these books in terms of the ways in which their child protagonists reposition themselves in relation to family in the course of their narratives. Drawing on Esther Saxey’s recent narratological analysis of the coming-out story in Homoplot, I will argue that the way in which Jones shows her protagonists both coming to terms with their families of origin and creating new kin networks or ‘chosen families’ makes her books particularly hospitable to queer readers – or at least to this queer reader