From Homer to Ancient Greek Lyric Poetry: Selected Essays on The Classics of Gran Most, translated by Gao Feng and Liu Chun, Peking University Press, October 2021, 424 pp. 75.00 yuan
I first came into contact with Professor Glenn Most on the evening of January 26, 2018, at a book-breaking event at the University of Chicago's Co-op Seminary Bookstores, Gran Most's early Greek Philosophy, a Lowbudo volume compiled by Glenn Laks in collaboration with André Laks. He had a dialogue with James Redfield, a retired classical scholar at Chicago, on early Greek philosophical issues. Prior to this day, the Franke Institute for the Humanities at Chiba university also hosted conferences on early Greek philosophy. In the dialogue held by the cooperative bookstore, Redfield did not say much, and Most talked about it, and he was very familiar with the issues of academic history. Among them, I was most impressed by the two. First, Moster had a very global outlook, and he specifically mentioned that since some of the fragments of early Greek philosophy were preserved only in Syriac and Arabic translations, Most planned to publish them in Syrian/Arabic-English contrast, but this plan was opposed by the editor-in-chief of the Lobb series. Because Lobb had never dealt with literature other than Greek or Latin, the editor-in-chief believed that the english translation of these fragments was only needed, and the original text was blank; at Moster's strong request, the editor-in-chief finally agreed to enter the original Syrian and Arabic texts. Second, in the question-and-answer session, a teacher at Chittagong university asked whether the concept of "pre-Socratic philosophy" was discarded because of its strong teleological overtones and replaced by "early Greek philosophy", similar to the current biblical study that does not like the "Old Testament" and uses the concept of "Hebrew Bible". From the two aspects of classics and biblical studies, Most sorted out the context of their respective problems and believed that the two were not the same. Time has passed, and I have forgotten what the specific reason Most gave was, but what impressed me was that in the interaction with Moster, the teacher looked more like a student, and Moster looked like a professor among professors. This lecture four years ago was still the most shocking of all the lectures I have heard so far (especially after the epidemic, I have enjoyed online academic activities, and listened to many lectures from universities in China, Europe and the United States), and most of the impressions in my heart are also derived.
Seminary Cooperative Bookstore Event
Earlier, in the Survey of Greek Literature class in the fall semester of 2017, when I talked about Pindar, I read Moster's The Measures of Praise: Structure and Function in Pindar's Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes) is not particularly impressive, and the book is generally a traditional "elementary school" study. The Scale of Praise is Moster's doctoral dissertation at the University of Tübingen, which was reprinted in English and published in Germany. It can be said that this book is not a typical American work, and it is not intended to establish some kind of broad research paradigm or bring Pinda research into some more important theoretical framework. Later, I also read the Chinese translation of doubting Thomas published by Triptych Bookstore, although the book was originally published by Harvard University Press, but it is more like a European academic essay, there is no academic footnote to second-hand references, only some bibliographies at the end, and it is not an American monograph that emphasizes academic norms. Thus, although Most has published several monographs, such as The Scale of Praise and Dorma the Skeptic, we cannot use Most's book to establish a judgment of his scholarly methods and contexts, as most literary figures in the United States have done. In general, Moster is still like many Continental linguists who lack American "monographs", dabbling extensively on various issues and writing a large number of articles, while his monographs can be said to be super long papers.
Compiled by Gao Feng and Liu Chun, "From Homer to Ancient Greek Lyric Poetry: Selected Papers of Gran Mostert's Classical Studies" can help us get a glimpse of Moster's research in the field of ancient Greek literature. I have no intention of writing a book review for the entire collection of essays, which researchers of ancient Greek literature are more suitable for. For me, an observation from Simonides' Ode to Scopas in Contexts, the twelfth essay in this book, is very interesting:
The craze of neo-historicism has now reached its peak in the study of modern language and literature, leaving the wreckage of cultural studies on the beaches of many English and comparative literature departments in the United States; it is expected that sooner or later it will sweep the classical circles, and in fact it has appeared in the works of some extremely predictable classical scholars. In the current situation of classical scholarship, this does not only bring drawbacks. Classical knowledge of the relationship between ancient literature and ancient history remains incredibly superficial: the former is language, the latter is physical; the former is the individual subjectivity and poetic carving, the latter is the atrocities of institutional limitations and power... In this and other respects, the widely practiced institutional division of the Departments of Classical And Classical Literature and the Departments of Ancient History reflects a betrayal of the ideals of "Altertumswissenschaft" (Altertumswissenschaft) proposed by Friedrich Auguste Wolff. Perhaps the new historicism will shake the status quo. (363 pages)
In this article, originally published in 1994, Most interprets an ode by the ancient Greek poet Simonides of the sixth century BC, and in the last part undertakes a methodological reflection on literary research. Moster mentions many methods of literary criticism, such as deconstructivism and new criticism, but Most emphasizes New Historicism in particular. First, from the perspective of literary theory, Most emphasizes that neo-historicism, like deconstructivism replacing new criticism, further expands the boundaries of "literary" research. But on the other hand, in the paragraph quoted above, Most emphasizes the unique significance of neohistorietism from the perspective of classicism—that it can break the boundary between ancient history and classical literature and realize the ideal of Alterumswissenschaft. For Altertumswissenschaft, the translator did not translate it directly as "ancient science" but more eloquently translated it as "ancient general studies". The word "Tong" is used to express the ideal conveyed by Altertumswissenschaft to open up literature and history and take ancient research as a whole.
Cultural Poetics of Ancient Greece
When I read this passage, I felt that I "met and hated each other later", because this is also how I came into contact with the use of new historicism in ancient Greek literature. New historicism first originated from the study of Shakespeare in English literature, and unlike the traditional historicist interpretation method, which one-sidedly emphasizes the reflection of literature on historical background, New Historicism emphasizes the ideology of literature itself and literature as part of the participants in historical subjects. Therefore, new historicism emphasizes the organic interaction between the historical background and the text when interpreting literary works. As a student of ancient history, I would want to make a historic interpretation when confronted with a literary work; but the ancient Greek literary scholars I met at Chittagong (excluding Moster) warned me that historicized reading literature is limiting the potential scope of literary interpretation, and that this is not the best way to study literature. And my ancient history teacher also told me that history and literature are two very different disciplines, just as Christians can only choose between Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant, and ancient civilization researchers can only choose one of the three, ancient history and archaeology. Confused, I came across Leslie Kurke, a professor of classics at the University of California, Berkeley, who published her 1991 book on Pinda, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy. The book struck me with a brilliant reading of the interaction between pinda odes and socio-economic relations in the fifth century BC, showing the possibilities across history and literature. I felt the same way as Moster's vision when Kerke demonstrated the ideals of Altertumswissenschaft. I did not realize, however, that Kerke was the most important scholar to subsisting neohistory into classics (especially ancient Greek literature), and That The Traffic in Praise was her first book.
In 1993, Carol Dougherty, a fellow prince at Princeton University, published The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece, a book that combed through the colonial ideologies presented in archaic Greek literature, including Pinda. In the same year, Kerke co-edited a collection of essays, Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, which can be seen as a "manifesto" of neohistoricism. The Economy of Kudos, which was included in Kerke's essay, defines cultural poetics (another term for new historicism) as follows: "[Cultural poetics] encourages us to read 'text' as context and history itself as text." The text and context are formed under the basis of diverse, competitive symbolic strategies and symbolic economies" This is not only a concise summary of the neo-historicist approach from a classical point of view, but can also be seen as a manifesto in the manifesto.
Cultural Poetics of Ancient Greece
From an academic point of view, Kerke and Dolti have their own characteristics in the study of ancient Greek literature within the framework of neo-historicism, and Kerke has made more important contributions to the development of the neo-historicist method in classical studies. Doherty's Wesleyan College, where Doherty taught, offered only undergraduate teaching and could not produce graduate students, and Berkeley, where Kerke was the epicenter of graduate education in the United States, where Helker worked with Mark Griffith, an expert on Greek tragedy, to produce countless scholars of Greek literature. One of Kerke's earliest students at Berkeley, Victoria Wohl, now teaching at the University of Toronto, built on her doctoral dissertation and published Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy in 1998. Based on the feminist anthropologist Gary Rubin's theory of combining the anthropological approach to gender studies (represented by Lévi-Strauss) with the psychoanalytic approach (represented by Freud), the book provides a political-economic interpretation of women in several Greek tragedies from the perspective of women as a transactional object in patriarchal societies. In summary, Kerke not only published his first monograph and edited the first collection of essays in the 1990s, but also trained the first student to publish a monograph, and the common theme of all three was a new historicist interpretation of ancient Greek literature.
From this point of view, Moster's article, probably written in 1987 or 1988 and finally published in 1994 (according to the notes at the beginning of the article, it was first published at a conference in 1988) successfully made a certain prediction, and over the next decade Neo-historicism increasingly entered Greek literature, and this research paradigm was institutionalized through postgraduate training. In terms of research content, Most also made it clear: "Neo historicism further encompasses almost all texts, and does not despise historical writing (which is regarded as a text), public and private documents, and even advertising and popular culture creation." Here, too, Moster seems to have delineated the direction of classical studies under future neo-historicism. In this regard, we can look at the later writings of Kerck and Wall. After Traffic in Praise, Kerke wrote two major books—Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece and Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose）。 Both books, as Most emphasizes, "do not despise the writing of history," and Coins, Bones, Games, and Gold place Herodotus in the context of the struggle between the greek aristocratic ideology and the merchant ideology of the archaic period. "Aesopian Dialogue" not only contains the works of two different genres, Herodotus and Plato, but also draws on the concept of anthropologist James Scott's "hidden transcripts", emphasizing that Herodotus's prose creation and Plato's Socratic dialogue contain the "popular underclass" such as the Aesop tradition. The Aesop Dialogues have also become a very important work on ancient popular culture, and it is true that Moster emphasized that popular culture will become the object of classical study.
Similarly, Wall's two books—Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens—and Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory) embodies this as well. The two books read Thucydides and Athenian legal speeches as literary works and analyzed them ideologically. And Moster's "public and private documents" will be the subject of literary research under neohistoricism, as evidenced by another of Kirk's students, Athena Kirk, who now teaches at Cornell University, published "Ancient Greek Lists: Catalogues and Inventory Across Genres" last year. A cultural interpretation of an underappreciated phenomenon in ancient Greek texts—lists (such as the "Homeric watch" of the regional army generals listed in the Iliad) reveals the cultural logic behind this dry genre. Of particular note is the importance that Kirk attached great importance to the interaction between lists in literature and lists in inscriptions. Ancient Greek inscriptions were often valued only for historians as first-hand historical materials, while Kirk emphasized from a literary point of view that inscriptions were a real-world cultural practice.
If Kerke and her students mainly brought neohistory into the study of classical Greek literature, this influence has spread to other fields of classicism. In the field of Hellenistic literature, Kerke collaborated with Paul Kosmin, an expert on hellenistic history at Harvard University, to direct Monica Park's doctoral dissertation on the Ptolemaic poet Carrimarcus, "The Mortal Divine: Callimachus and the Making of an Imperial." Theology) (Monica Park later taught at Vanderbilt University, but has now left the academic community, and this doctoral dissertation is still in lockdown, so I didn't read it). In his 2013 Harvard doctoral dissertation, "Imaginary Lands: Ethnicity, Exoticism, and Narrative in the Ancient Novel," Robert Cioffi, who studied Greek fiction at Bard College in New York, emphasized learning from Kerke's approach to classical Greek literature. Within my reach, there are two latin literature studies—Phebe Bowditch's Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage, published in 2001, and Neil Coffe's 2009, The Commerce of War War: Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic) both point to the use of Kirke's writings as a template for interpreting Latin poetry. In addition to classics, Kerker's neo-historicist approach also directly influenced the study of Chinese literature. In Berkeley's Department of Comparative Literature, as principal mentor, he mentored Tamara Chin, who now teaches at Brown University, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and Economic Imagination) directly brought Kerker's new historicist approach to early Chinese literature, and the book is in many ways traced by Coins, Bones, Games, and Gold.
The Savage Exchange, Harvard University Press
Moster not only succeeded in predicting the rise of neo-historicism in classicism, but also very insightfully pointed out which problems would become the object of study, which was confirmed by the practice of Kerck and his students as a hipster. Of course, in recent years, the study of Greek literature has also seen a trend of returning to "formalism". Naomi Weiss, a student of Kerke's at Berkeley and now teaching at Harvard, based on his Berkeley doctoral dissertation, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater, is a purely formalist literary analysis. Wall also began to be self-critical, arguing in her 2015 book Euripides and the Politics of Form that if scholars of the Neo-historicist path saw both ancient Greek tragedy and the official greek archives as mere manifestations of a certain ideology, what was the significance of tragedy as a literary genre? This is undoubtedly a reflection on his early studies of Greek tragedy. Therefore, Wall stressed that if there is a historicist interpretation of literary works, without considering the formalistic characteristics of their literary genres, it is not complete historicism. Although Wall is using formalism to make up for the shortcomings of historicism, this is undoubtedly a return to some kind of formalism. Mario Telò, who now teaches at Berkeley and previously at Möstedle Supérieure normale in Pisa, in his recently published Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, initially argued for a new way to find a way when historicism was already dominating Greek literature, and Tylo also opened "radical formalism" in Berkeley this semester. Radical Formalisms seminars in response to the return to formalism. We can observe whether there will be new changes in Berkeley, which is the stronghold of the study of neo-historicist Greek literature.
Finally, most of today's heavyweight scholars in the Anglo-American classical circles, including Most of the most important scholars in the Anglo-American classical circles, including Moster and Kirk, emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s, and Both Most and Kirke were from the research class. In addition, Alain Bresson, an expert in the economic history of ancient Greece who currently teaches at the University of Chicago, is also a research student. His 1979 doctoral dissertation, Myth and Contradiction: Analyse de la ViIe Olimpique de Pindare, gave a structuralist interpretation of Pinda's ode to Rhode Island, which has a very deep imprint of the times. In addition to the economic history of ancient Greece, Rhode Island inscriptions are also one of Buchson's research specialties, although this has traces of his early research on the Ode to Pinda rhodes, but it is very different from the research style of that time. In addition, Nino Luraghi, now Chair Professor of Greek History at oxford University, published his doctoral dissertation in 1994, "Sicilian and the Tyrants of Greater Greece in the Archaic Period: From The Panetio of Leotini to the Grecia of Sicilia e Magna Grecia: Da Panezio di Leontini alla caduta dei Dinomenidi）。 Since a considerable part of the carols of Pinda were written to the tyrants and nobles of the Sicily region, the Pinda hymns are an important historical source for Lulaj's study of Sicily. At the same time, Lulaji also quotes Kirk's book on Pinda in this book, which can be seen as one of the earliest influences of Kirk's work in Continental academia. However, Lulaj's later interests were not in Sicily history, and he therefore left Pinda. Arguably, although not a "hedgehog" scholar, Kerke was generally committed to the field of classical Greek literature compared to the "foxes" like Moster, Buchson, and Lulagi, who were constantly wandering to other fields, especially her recent collaboration with Richard Neer, an expert in greek art history at the University of Chicago (Neil was also a student of Kirke before Berkeley), in Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology) is back in Pinta. Pinda also seems to have become, to some extent, a meeting point and watershed for several classicalists with very different styles.
Reading Moster's 1994 essay nearly thirty years later, in addition to his contributions to Simone's research, is more important than its reflections and prophecies on neohistoricism that record a moment in academic history. Therefore, the translation of "From Homer to Ancient Greek Lyric Poems" including this article into the Chinese context will undoubtedly have unique value, providing us with a convenient way to glimpse the vicissitudes of European and American classical studies in the past three decades. Moster had successfully predicted the impact of New Historicism on Classics, and he is now actively engaged in comparative classics, with particular emphasis on cooperation with Chinese scholars and sinologists, although this orientation is still a minority among European and American classical scholars, and in a few decades we may understand that this is another "pre-stream" as we read Moster's reflections on New Historicism.