Should the study of 'the classics' be dismantled and rebuilt?

A question raised in the current issue of Brown Alumni Monthly.

"For 21st-century American proponents of the supremacy of 'white culture,' ancient Greece and Rome are revered as where it all started. That’s among the many reasons Princeton classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, in an incendiary 2019 panel discussion, denounced his own field as engaging in the 'production of whiteness' and said he hopes classics, as currently constructed, 'dies as swiftly as possible.'

Since then, more and more scholars have been asking, should classics even proceed as a field? Does it need merely to be disrupted or should it be dismantled altogether, dispersed into the departments of history, archaeology, art history, and foreign languages? How can classics — a historically white, male, and elite field of study — be made more accessible?"

"Classics: Dead or Alive? A new course examines ancient Greece and Rome with a 21st-century lens." Peder Schaefer ’22. Brown Alumni Monthly. June–August 2022.

Intellectual history

Judith Butler, interviewed November 2024, says:

"I don’t like the category of the public intellectual, because it focuses on the individual. When somebody’s work becomes publicly interesting, it’s because something is already happening in the world: changes in the way young people think about the future and themselves; alterations in the family form; openness about sexuality; curiosity about gender... These public issues, often vexing, are what bring certain intellectuals into prominence because they’re reflecting on what turns out to be really important to people at the time. ... Most of our work is collaborative, even when only a single author is named."
— Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’, Iker Seisdedos, El Pais, December 14, 2024

Seisdedos asks: "In your latest book, you speak of a 'phantasm' created to stoke fears about gender. Do you sympathize with parents who are worried about their children making mistakes?"

Butler: "Yes. Those parents have a fear, but I can’t understand why they don’t want to know about certain things [emphasis mine]. I had a man say to me in Chile that he didn’t want a gay or lesbian family living next door to him. “I’m heterosexual, married, I enjoy reproductive sexuality, my way of life is the way that God has mandated, and it is the only correct and moral one.” His fear was that if there were different kinds of legitimate families, then his form would become less natural and less necessary."

He then asks: "Do you understand the concerns of feminists who think that gender could result in the erasure of women?"

Again, Butler says similarly: "I understand those fears, but that doesn’t mean that I think they’re based on knowledge [emphasis mine]. Perhaps those feminists need a better understanding of who trans people are. Womanhood won’t be erased just because we open the category and invite some more people in."

Butler is prepared to say this:

"The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger. I see a kind of restoration fantasy at play in many right-wing movements in the U.S. People want to go back to the idea of being a white country or the idea of the patriarchal family, the principle that marriages are for heterosexuals. I call it a nostalgic fury for an impossible past. Those in the grip of that fury are effectively saying: “I don’t like the complexity of this world, and all these people speaking all these languages. I’m fearful that my family will become destroyed by gender ideology.” As a consequence of that, they’re furiously turning against some of the most vulnerable people in this country, stripping of them of rights as they fear that the same will be done to them.

— Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’, Iker Seisdedos, El Pais, December 14, 2024

Woolf's 'The Voyage Out' highlights sexism and the vast gulfs between people

Virginia Woolf's first novel, "The Voyage Out," is one of her lesser-known books but it introduces some of her key ideas about gender and religion. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on May 30, 2012.

Virginia Woolf's first novel, "The Voyage Out," is one of her lesser-known books but it introduces some of her key ideas about gender and religion as well as the character Mrs. Dalloway who reappears in a later work. It was published in 1915 in England and in 1920 in the United States.

The novel follows Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who innately resists the polite society of her white, upper-middle-class English background but isn't yet quite sure how to assert herself or what sort of relationships to form. She lives more in her head than her heart. Emotionally she is a bit numb and she sees entanglement with others as a liability. Her new social crowd leads her to believe she is poorly educated, too, so she tries her best to catch up on her reading. The story is not primarily driven by action, as for many pages the characters are stuck on a boat and mostly sit around and talk, but rather by their charged banter.

Men pose infuriating comments such as, "no woman has what I may call the political instinct," "you've no respect for facts, Rachel; you're essentially feminine," and "have you got a mind, or are you like the rest of your sex?" Sometimes this is in the context of discussing women's suffrage, a contemporary British issue (women did not yet have the right to vote when Woolf wrote the novel), and sometimes these comments are made for no apparent reason.

Rachel is only occasionally annoyed. She largely absorbs this kind of sexism, making assumptions about other women such as: "she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold of in girls - nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory."

Rachel has a love affair of sorts with an aspiring novelist named Terence Hewet. His soliloquies begin with lines like "You're not beautiful, but I like your face" and go downhill from there. It is in both of their natures to be argumentative and brooding. In their chaste relationship they frequently fall silent. Somehow she consents to marry him and seems moderately convinced that she is happy in the engagement.

Terence claims to be penning a book on silence, especially on what people are really thinking when they refrain from voicing their feelings to each other. Every time silence is mentioned in the book, it therefore carries special weight. The pair furthermore entertain the notion that people can perceive each other's true natures just by staring. Terence defends his interest in writing by averring that "one doesn't want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them."

When their engagement disintegrates as quickly and mysteriously as it had arisen, they stare at their mirrored reflections in a poignant moment: "But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things."

An example of this visual contemplation is provided by another young woman who worries she is failing to gain Rachel's friendship: "Falling silent she looked at her visitor [Rachel], her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within." Later in the book, Rachel outright refuses to go to tea at another woman's house, vowing that "I'd rather have my right hand sawn in pieces – just imagine! the eyes of all those women!" Her ex-beau Terence reassures her: "Who wants to look at you?"

Atheism is also a recurring theme. One extended passage describes Rachel perceiving a church service in a new light and finding herself in "acute discomfort" as though "forced to sit through an unsatisfactory piece of music badly played." The problem is that "all round her were people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to grasp," and this sheeplike herd (which Woolf describes as "baaing") listens to the preacher "saying things which misrepresented the idea" at which they grasp.

Rachel's attempt to interpret the emotion of one devotee in the church pew simply by staring at her face results in her conclusion that the woman is "slavishly acquiescente, she was adoring ...something shallow and smug, clinging to it ... She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock, for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her." At this moment, Rachel consciously rejects the Christian belief of her childhood, although this doesn't noticeably affect her thoughts or behavior.

One line about a woman who had committed suicide is particularly eerie. "Why do people kill themselves? Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do? Nobody knows. They sat in silence." The author drowned herself in 1941. This resulted in all her work entering the public domain in 2012 in Great Britain, where copyright law covers work for 70 years following an author's death.

Although "The Voyage Out" cannot be described as a gripping tale, it provides insight into a certain social class in a certain era. It illuminates Virginia Woolf's perspective as an author and be used to interpret some of her later works.

Photo of fence at ocean edge taken in San Francisco by Tucker Lieberman.

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A literary analysis of "The Cave" by Jose Saramago

Originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 7, 2012.

A couple years after winning the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, Portuguese author Jose Saramago published The Cave, a novel about human connection in a time of uncertainty and uprooting. The book was soon translated from Portuguese into English by Margaret Jull Costa.

The plot elements are simple – a rural craftsman is taken advantage of by a large company, a stray dog shows up, a young married woman conceives, financial pressures force the family to move – and so the real impact of the novel lies in its psychological and philosophical explorations. The key to the story is in the emotional connections that characters make with each other tentatively. It's in Saramago's expression of how the dog noses his master's hand, how the girl tells her father she's pregnant.

The title evokes Plato's allegory about the human tendency to be captivated by illusions rather than to see truth directly. The surreal climax that gives the book this title does not occur until the last few pages of the story. Yet the entire book is, in a way, a reflection on the varying illusions contained in ordinary life and thought.

One of Saramago's literary tricks is to make lists of apparent synonyms. In one place, he writes,

"Yes, it is true, that no one ever saw him again, but he left us what was perhaps the best part of himself, the breath, the puff of air, the breeze, the soft wind, the zephyr, the very things that are now gently entering the nostrils of the six clay dolls..."

In another, he writes,

"But I've always understood that the secret of the bee doesn't actually exist, that it's a mystification, a false mystery, an unfinished fable, a tale that might have been but wasn't..."

Some readers are put off by this style. Can't one of the world's greatest writers settle on the proper word to convey his intended meaning? That desire for clarity is one of the very philosophical problems with which Saramago wrestles.

In one passage he explains that it is incoherence, not contradiction, that the human character generally avoids. A person is capable of believing and feeling contradictory things while still maintaining a coherent self-narrative. Saramago's lists of similar but non-identical concepts can be seen as illustrations of this principle. Is it breath or wind that ensouls the dolls? Does this side-by-side contradiction matter, especially as it is the province of metaphor and perception anyway?

Another justification for the lists is given here:

"…every now and then, one still comes across the occasional rare exception in this dull world of repetitions, as the Orphic, Pythagorean, Stoic, and Neoplatonic sages might have called it had they not preferred, with poetic inspiration, to give it the prettier and more sonorous name of the eternal return."

Eternal return is the philosophical idea, famously examined in modern Western philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche, that time is cyclical and everything that has happened before will happen again. Thus when Saramago says that his character "was busily planning ruses, tricks, ploys, stratagems, dodges, and subterfuges," he conveys the sense that this person is connected to every other person who has ever plotted deceit. The reader is not presented with a specific kind of deceit but rather with the vague impression of activities that fall into this category: the Platonic form of deceit. The specific character becomes universal and thereby eternal.

Another interesting feature of Saramago's writing is his representation of dialogue without line breaks or quotation marks. While this makes it difficult to interpret which character is making which comment, it reveals how an argument with another person can also be perceived as an argument with oneself. It shows how our contradictions live and breathe within us. We see how readily we can change our opinions to connect with others.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.