Jody Valentine, What is a Classic? Experimenting with Engaged Scholarship
Keywords: classical tradition, critical self-reflection, reflexive antiracism, Sappho, subjectivity, White privilege.
Abstract: In this essay, I reconsider and revise a talk called “What is a Classic?” that I gave in 2017. By refusing my own previous claims to kinship with T.S. Eliot and J.M. Coetzee, and by shifting my relationship to Sappho from one that embeds us in the classical tradition to one that refuses classicizing discourses, I commit to antiracist, engaged scholarship and model the process of change. Cultivating my perspective as a person who identifies as White, working class, and queer, I suggest that engaged scholarship, as a form of process-oriented, deliberately subjective and self-reflective academic inquiry, supports trenchant object analysis, personal experiences of coherence, and ethical social practices.
Sarah Cullinan Herring, A Trans Philology of Bion’s Lament for Adonis
Keywords: Adonis, Bion, gender, trans theory, philology.
Abstract: This article explores the connections between trans theory and the ancient figure of Adonis in order to offer a definition of “trans philology”. The literary and historical ancestors for Bion’s Lament for Adonis are considered, offering important evidence that Adonis is already presented as a “gender outlaw” (Bornstein 2016) even in archaic and classical texts. The article then offers a close reading of Bion’s Lament for Adonis, resisting earlier editors’ attempts to erase Adonis’ ambiguous embodiment in this poem. The piece then closes by offering a wider context for the frequent connections in Greek literature between gender non-conformity and violent death, tracing an uncomfortable theme which makes it difficult to find in Adonis a wholly positive gender queer or trans ancestor.
Joy Woolley and Paul Robertson, Reconsidering Medusa’s Punishment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Keywords: Medusa, rape, victim blaming, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Abstract: The popular understanding of Medusa today is largely based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which recounts Minerva transforming Medusa from beautiful maiden into snake-haired monster due to Neptune’s rape. Both academic translations and popular receptions of this story typically feature the view that Medusa was the one punished, at least in part due to her perceived role in Neptune’s sexual assault, understanding Medusa as a key figure in the history of victim blaming. However, attention to Ovid’s original description of the episode demonstrates that Minerva was not punishing Medusa but rather the deed itself, perpetuated by Neptune. Furthermore, attention to the wider context of the story as well as Ovid’s other accounts of divinities sexually assaulting mortals suggests that Medusa’s transformation should be understood as distinctive, and was not intended as a punishment but rather as a deterrent against such attacks in the future.
Sally Mubarak, ‘Whitewashing’ the Samnites: Roman Imperialism and the Modern Legacy of Empire
Keywords: Samnites, Roman imperialism, decolonising classics, romanisation, archaeology of Samnium.
Abstract: The rise of Rome serves as the driving paradigm behind most scholarly works on central and southern Italy in the first millennium BCE. The peoples of these regions, often ‘othered’ in contrast to Roman civilisation, are portrayed as an inconvenient disruption to Rome’s inevitable domination. This paper traces the pervasiveness of romanocentric constructions of the Samnites, connecting them to wider systemic issues of underrepresentation within the fields of classics and ancient history. In doing so, this paper offers new readings of the Samnites as an independent community with its own cultural traditions, infrastructure, and agency, thus drawing attention to an unrelenting legacy of whiteness and academic imperialism.