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Intellectual Pluralism and the Common Pursuit Ramus Twenty Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

A.J. Boyle
A.J. Boyle*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences. Here, one would suppose, was a place for quiet co-operative labour. The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject—and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the contrary prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain. We are tempted to expel the lot.

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923)
      legere enim et non intellegereneglegere est.
      (To read and to misread is to miss a reading of one's world.)
    Prologue to Dicta Catonis 1 (3rd Cent. CE)

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 113 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1991

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References

1. My italics, . The ideal (and the phrase) informed the genesis of Arion (Vol. 1.1 [Spring 1962], 3–7Google Scholar) and its reincarnation in the early seventies (n.s. Vol. 1.1 [Spring 1973], 7–66), as was underscored recently by Halporn, J.W., Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2 (1991), 189ffGoogle Scholar.

2. This misunderstanding seems in part the confusion observed a decade ago by Lloyd-Jones, H., ‘Introduction’ to U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (London 1982), xxixGoogle Scholar: ‘Critics should learn not to confuse the nineteenth-century German tradition of philology with the eighteenth-century tradition of exclusively textual interpretation kept alive by Housman and still adhered to by a tiny handful of heroic Housmanites.’

3. Schmidt, E.G. in Ward Briggs, W. and Calder, W.M. HI (edd.), Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia (New York and London 1990), 160Google Scholar.

4. I do not wish to imply that all contributors to the Culham/Edmunds volume are unaware of the long history of hermeneutics and theory in classics. But even some of those who are not (for example, John Peradotto at 179ff, in a reprint of his Arethusa Vol. 16 article) seem to underplay their extent and influence.

5. Thomas, Richard F., ‘Past and Future in Classical Philology’, Comp. Lit. Studies 27 (1990), 68Google Scholar.

6. Owen, Stephen, ‘Philology’s Discontents’, Comp. Lit. Studies 27 (1990), 77Google Scholar.

7. Francis Cairns (Leeds) once asked John Henderson (King’s College, Cambridge) how he would describe himself: ‘Poststructuralist, deconstructionist, or what?’ Henderson replied: ‘Latinist.’

8. ‘Anti-Foundational Philology’, Comp. Lit Studies 27 (1990), 49. Culler rightly emphasises— but also overemphasises—this issue. The ‘P’s’ of course, refer to the call numbers used in the Library of Congress catalogue system for books on language and literature.

9. The reference is to Cavafy’s, C.P. poem ‘Expecting the Barbarians’, quoted as follows in the Rae Dalven translation (The Complete Poems of Cavafy [San Diego/New York/London 1976]Google Scholar) by Marilyn Skinner (Culham and Edmunds, 198), at the head of an article which presents a position quite contrary to that contained in this paragraph: Why such inaction in the Senate? Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws? Because the barbarians are to arrive today. What further laws can the Senators pass? When the barbarians come they will make the laws… Why don’t the worthy orators come as usual to make their speeches, to have their say? Because the barbarians are to arrive today; and they get bored with eloquence and orations. The ending of the poem may seem to imply ‘that there are no longer any barbarians’. Would it were so.