One of the more amusing assumptions that I run into sometimes as a Classicist is the one that everything to be said about Greek and Roman literature has already been said. Because both literature and history are very much the products of whoever is doing the investigating, it is always going to be possible to write something new about either Homer’s Odyssey or the dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
That being said, a new scholar does have to be able to explain why his of her particular approach to an old topic is right. Simply saying that you’re going to apply a novel method isn’t enough to justify a project. Such justification usually means be able to articulate the theoretical framework upon which your project relies.
I’ve already made clear in this blog that a major part of the framework of my project is looking at Greek and Roman manumission jointly and diachronically. That is, rather than trying to create a Greek method of manumission that was practiced for hundreds of years and then compare it to a Roman method of manumission that was practiced for hundreds of years, I’m going to look at Greek and Roman manumission from a similar time period and talk about the kind of social pressures and expectations that these particular instances of manumission are reacting to.
Such a description of my dissertation should be sufficient to satisfy interests in my methodology. However, since I have an interest in both literary and political theory (as well as the more nebulous affair of critical theory), I may try to include some ideas from thinkers who don’t directly work with Classics or Ancient History.
One such thinker is Homi Bhabha, who writes on culture and politics through a framework that is usually described as Post-Colonial. I’m currently making a go at his work The Location of Culture for some ideas of how to think about how the Greeks and Romans interacted at this time, especially since the Roman tradition of Comedy specifically relies so much on the Greeks.
One of the things that Bhabha is interested in is how literature connects to the wider political and historical world. He has some gnomic lines that give me a lot to think about, such as “As literary creatures and political animals, we ought to concern ourselves with the understanding of human action and the social world as a moment when something is beyond control, but it is not beyond accommodation... how the historical event is represented in a discourse that is somehow beyond control.” (Location of Culture, page 12, emphasis original).
What I think Bhabha is describing here is how an artist doesn’t have complete control over his or her work, because of the expectations of the audience that shape what is possible. Nonetheless, the artist can accommodate these expectations, can respond to reactions prior to the work being finished and let loose into the public realm. Obviously there’s a lot more going on here, mainly because Bhabha is constructing a larger argument.
That being said, a new scholar does have to be able to explain why his of her particular approach to an old topic is right. Simply saying that you’re going to apply a novel method isn’t enough to justify a project. Such justification usually means be able to articulate the theoretical framework upon which your project relies.
I’ve already made clear in this blog that a major part of the framework of my project is looking at Greek and Roman manumission jointly and diachronically. That is, rather than trying to create a Greek method of manumission that was practiced for hundreds of years and then compare it to a Roman method of manumission that was practiced for hundreds of years, I’m going to look at Greek and Roman manumission from a similar time period and talk about the kind of social pressures and expectations that these particular instances of manumission are reacting to.
Such a description of my dissertation should be sufficient to satisfy interests in my methodology. However, since I have an interest in both literary and political theory (as well as the more nebulous affair of critical theory), I may try to include some ideas from thinkers who don’t directly work with Classics or Ancient History.
One such thinker is Homi Bhabha, who writes on culture and politics through a framework that is usually described as Post-Colonial. I’m currently making a go at his work The Location of Culture for some ideas of how to think about how the Greeks and Romans interacted at this time, especially since the Roman tradition of Comedy specifically relies so much on the Greeks.
One of the things that Bhabha is interested in is how literature connects to the wider political and historical world. He has some gnomic lines that give me a lot to think about, such as “As literary creatures and political animals, we ought to concern ourselves with the understanding of human action and the social world as a moment when something is beyond control, but it is not beyond accommodation... how the historical event is represented in a discourse that is somehow beyond control.” (Location of Culture, page 12, emphasis original).
What I think Bhabha is describing here is how an artist doesn’t have complete control over his or her work, because of the expectations of the audience that shape what is possible. Nonetheless, the artist can accommodate these expectations, can respond to reactions prior to the work being finished and let loose into the public realm. Obviously there’s a lot more going on here, mainly because Bhabha is constructing a larger argument.