Classical Reception: A Failed Revolution? with Luke Richardson

Abstract

For generations, the classical discipline’s exclusive study of Greece and Rome went unquestioned, as did its position at the heart of the humanities. Greece and Rome’s literature, art and intellectual legacy were seen not only as formative to modern culture, but as emblematic of universal value, and Classicists studied, by their own reckoning, the peak of human achievement. The emergent field of Classical Reception Studies has challenged many of these assumptions. Scholars who wish not simply to study the ancient past but rather to study the study of the ancient past have asked, why Greece and Rome? Why no other culture? And what does this act of choosing ultimately reveal? Yet even as these questions have been formulated, the response inside modern Classics has been lukewarm at best. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah is joined by Luke Richardson, formerly postgraduate teaching assistant at University College London, who researches the intellectual impact of the ongoing obsession with Greece and Rome. They discuss the seeming inability of modern Classics to come to terms with essential questions about itself and the languages of Western supremacy it represents.

Bibliography

open-source

Luke Richardson, ‘Teaching the Classical Reception “Revolution”’, CUCD Bulletin (2017)

Mathura Umachandran, ‘Fragile, Handle with Care: On White Classicists’ Eidolon (2017)

Mathura Umachandran, ‘More than a Common Tongue: Dividing Race and Class across the Atlantic’, Eidolon (2019)

Paywalled

Adam Lecznar, Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar et al (eds.), Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

Postclassicisms Collective, Postclassicisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) 

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.