Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception

Fragmented, buried, and largely lost, the classical past presents formidable obstacles to anyone who would seek to know it. 'Deep Classics' is the study of these obstacles and, in particular, of the way in which the contemplation of the classical past resembles – and has even provided a model for – other kinds of human endeavor. This volume offers a new way to understand the modalities and aims of Classics itself, through the ages. Its individual chapters draw fruitful connections between the reception of the classical and current concerns in philosophy of mind, cognitive theory, epistemology, media studies, sense studies, aesthetics, queer theory and eco-criticism. What does the study of the ancient past teach us about our encounters with our own more recent but still elusive memories? What do our always partial reconstructions of ancient sites tell us about the limits of our ability to know our own world, or to imagine our future? What does the reader of the lacunose and corrupted literatures of antiquity learn thereby about literature and language themselves? What does a shattered statue reveal about art, matter, sensation, experience, life? Does the way in which these vestiges of the past are encountered – sitting in a library, standing in a gallery, moving through a ruin – condition our responses to them and alter their significance? And finally, how has the contemplation of antiquity helped to shape seemingly unrelated disciplines, including not only other humanistic and scientific epistemologies but also non-scholarly modes and practices? In asking these and similar questions, Deep Classics makes a pointed intervention in the study of the classical tradition, now more widely known as 'reception studies'.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Notes on the Contributors Introduction. On the Origin of “Deep Classics”, Shane Butler 1. Homer's Deep, Shane Butler 2. The Sigh of Philhellenism, Joshua Billings 3. Feeling on the Surface: Touch and Emotion in Fuseli and Homer, Alex Purves 4. Perceiving (in) Depth: Landscape, Sculpture, Ruin, Helen Slaney 5. Etymological 'Alterity': Depths and Heights, Joshua Katz 6. Shut Your Eyes and See, Adam Lecznar 7. The loss of telos: Pasolini, Fugard, and the Oresteia, Sarah Nooter 8. Kings of the Stone Age, or How to Read an Ancient Inscription, Stephanie Ann Frampton 9. Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past, Sebastian Matzner 10. Affects and contexts. A deep history of erotic anger, Giulia Sissa 11. Ghostwritten Classics, Edmund Richardson 12. Relic | channel | ghost: Centaurs in Algernon Blackwood's The Centaur, Mark Payne 13. Circulation of Spectres: Ghosts and Spells, Davide Susanetti 14. Cosmopoiesis in the Field of the Classical, Brooke Holmes 15. Borges and the Disclosure of Antiquity, Laura Jansen Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Shane Butler is Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is author of The Ancient Phonograph (2015) and co-editor of Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (2013).

Review :
The fruits of this volume are various. As a whole, it provides a welcome recharging of an intermittent conversation about how we conceive of, relate to and study the ancient world. As a breeding ground of Ph.D. theses, this is wonderfully fertile soil ... [The book] opens areas where we may not have looked before. If one reads the collection sequentially ... What follows is a series of diverse and absorbing chapters ranging in form from narrow(er)-focus case studies (e.g. M. Payne, S. Nooter) to wide-focus meditations on the state of the field. The pieces are thoughtful, often provocative, always thoughtprovoking. If you want the deepest thoughts of the cleverest classicists alive today, read this volume. These essays bore into our relationship with the past, exposing and exploiting the sublime, geological metaphors of profundity and collapse that structure our relationship with distant antiquity. Yet for all that they bore, they never bore: these are thrilling soundings, which will captivate anyone interested in (re)thinking 'deep' antiquity. The subtitle of this important book calls on us to rethink classical reception, currently the fastest growing area of the subject but one badly in need of a fresh injection of intellectual energy. This Shane Butler, with his powerful idea of 'Deep Classics', and his team of talented contributors provide in spades. Anyone interested in how classical reception studies are best pursued will benefit from reading it. Every page brings new, discrete pleasures. These essays dazzle in their inventiveness and vitality. This collection is powerful reminder about why the study of classical antiquity and its legacy matters. In its capacity for provocation as much as theoretical self-awareness, the present volume is a major intervention in classical reception studies. It provides an excellent core sample of the state of the art with the confident hallmarks of a sub-discipline that is no longer required to make the case for its existence, or perhaps worse, domesticated as "a detachable postscript" … Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception is essential and stimulating reading for those both in the field of classical reception studies and beyond: it certainly deserves a wide audience.