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I think Janina is making a series of mental leaps here which are actually very useful in examining perceptions of Classics.
F'r example:
You see I just really don't like the line of thought taken in the study of latin, ancient greek, ancient history, ancient philosophy, I find it boring, I just don't like it and never have.
Is about the "line of thought taken in the study of..." which assumes i) that there is a single, monolithic means of studying a set of knowable things called, collectively, Classics, and ii) that the way they are taught is indistinguishable from the subject matter (which is a good postmodern view, and perfectly defensible, but depends heavily on (i) being the case).
Of course, it's also a personal opinion - what Janina may be saying is "I am not interested in the subject matter, nor in the way it is presented, ergo I have no interest in the knowable set of things describable as Classics". Which is probably for the best; if everyone was fascinated by the study of the Classics, then it would be pretty difficult to, say, build or maintain power plants (mind you, the Greeks discovered steam power...anyone for a chiton-clad steampunk murder-mystery?). But, in itself, says no more about the intrinsic worth of the study of classics than my comparative lack of interest in organic chemistry.
Likewise:
To some extent postmodern fiction takes on the same cast, it's the inherent criticism of the classics that I can regard through the work, though I'd be just as happy without them.
Now, I'm no expert on postmodern fiction, so I'm going to have to fall back on modern - is the "inherent criticism" of the Odyssey, for example, a removable component of Ulysses? Is it more a less a removable component than, say, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon? I may be misunderstanding, but this seems to be a very atomic view of a) the novel and b) culture in general, which would be decidedly un-postmodern...
(Oh, PS - on postmodernism and the Classics, suggest you check out a thread in Books called "The Iliad" or somesuch, which has some very interesting stuff on, among other things, constructions we would probably identify as redolent of "postmodernism". Or talk to Deva - she seems to know about these things)
Lurid - quickly, since a lot of your post is scary maths stuff (and would lead to a "Godel of Aphrodite" gag that would be both excruciating and confusing for all of us) - I think it's a very good question:
Do you think that this arises solely because of the temporal breadth of Classics?
To which I can only reply, "sort of". At the risk of going all Greek Fire, I think that i) the set of entities generally identified as Classics have been around for a long time, but have also been relevant for a long time, and as such have been viewed, altered, focused and refocused since the year dot.
F'r example, the Arcadia thing above, which starts with a mystico-political thing (to enhance prestige, city states need divine etiologies. Athens is a bit pissingly obvious, but, for example, one legend has the infant Zeus being hidden from his murderous father in a cave in Arcadia, and the clamor and wild noises by which he was hidden leads perhaps to the god of clamour, Pan, who is associated with Arcadia and also with the pastoral - i.e stuff about shepherds), then becomes a cult worship, crops up in history (Pan makes a guest appearance in Herodotus, IIRC), then Arcadia, this idealised space which may or may not be imagined as the geographical Arcadia, appears in the poetry of Theocritus, poems about shepherds in Southern Greece written by a librarian in Egypt, creating a world which is mixed in with rural Italy at the time of the civil wars by Virgil, crashing together Greek shepherds with elements of Italian flora and politics, then on to the rediscovery of Virgil by a mass audience in the 16th and 17th centuries, Poussin, Brideshead revisited...all of these elements informing and being informed by other elements too numerous to mention...I think that things identifiable as elements of the field of Classics wind their way through the languages and the culture of the West in a way that other civilisations and cultures frequently do not, as generation after generation has found new ways to reflect upon themselves and their world (until pretty recently, democracy was considered a dangerous and pagan idea throughout Europe; in the 19th Century the Imperial British overwrote their own ideals onto the Romans and Athenians, crating a new and highly textured (and, realistically, numpty-heided) view of what those cultures meant and were. The Athenians didn't have sex with boys, the Beatles didn't take drugs, Liberace loved the ladies...Victorians, Nazis, D'Annunzio, Brecht, Racine, Ted Hughes, the Holy Roman Empire, the Seleucid monarchy - everyone is on the slipstream (possibly in the same way that in 4000 years' time, assuming there is life on Earth, the Americans may be a thing to think with).
Which is sort of the other problem with the idea that there is a monolithic set of learnings identifiable as Classics, and a monolithic manner of experiencing them - those living in the classics are constantly reevaluating and representing them; there isn't a cut-off point when Romulus Augustulus ran down the standard and said "right, everyone, write on one side of the page only".
Ennius claims that Homer came to him in a dream and told him to write epic poetry, then Ovid claims subsequently that Cupid wouldn't let him get on with his own epic. Pausanias writes a guidebook to Greece that instructs the 2nd Century tourist on the locations and histories of the Greek temples they might be visiting. Virgil's Eclogues only go over big when the smash hit success of the Aeneid (which uses the story of the foundation of Rome as a thing to think with about Roman history and destiny, and the birth of the Empire) inspires hunger for his earlier work, Roman sculptors make knock-offs of classic 4th-century statues and sell them as room decorations. The same archetypes and myths are visited over and over again from generation to generation and invested with different meanings.
The other thing which I would say is probably different from, say, the study of modern Portugese is that we are dealing with people who, despite the common linguistic elements and the desire of various civilisations at various times to make common cause ("like the British, the Romans accepted the unwelcome necessity of imposing order on a chaotic world that would otherwise have consumed itself in war and savagery") are quite simply Not Like Us(tm), whose many cultures are to varying degrees strange and alien, but intimately wrapped up in our own cultural self-definition.
Which, personally, I think is interestink. Wery interestink..... |
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) to work much more on the visual/pictogram level, so interpreting visual material is a major part of the discipline. 