Afterlife of the Classical Greek Tradition

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Afterlife of the Classical Greek Tradition

• Mid-semester

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Antikerezeption

• The creative appropriation of classical material,
  in any form.
• The adaptation of mythological and literary
  material and figures
• The adaptation and development of literary forms
  and means of expression,
• The use of social, intellectual, cultural, and
  historical facts and dates, developments and
  problems
• irrespective of whether the recipient draws
  directly on antiquity or accesses it through a
  more indirect source.

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Greek and Roman Heritage

• Unique status in the West
• Counts as shared tradition in the West
• Consciously adopt
• Consciously reject

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Myth as inspiration

• The richest source of inspiration has been
  mythology.
• In contrast to local legends and myths, Greek
  myths are shared in the West
• mythical archetypes
• appear to demand ever anew that we create our own
  version of them
• in contradistinction
• not only to the original,
• but also to countless subsequent variations
• Backdrop and inspiration to create new myths

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Sources of information on ClassicalGreece

• The source texts are rarely read (except in
  school)
• Virtually never read in the original
• Secondary sources prevail
• Derek Walcott speaks

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Why the Greek Tradition?

• Test the validity of the myths within the
  changing social conditions.
• Usurp the authority of the Greek tradition.
• Enter into a dialogue with another author, text,
  or text form.

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The Physical Past Aesthetics

• Winckelmann (1717 - 1768)
• noble simplicity and quiet grandeur
• Keats (1795-1821) Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Fictional Vase lends authority to his own
  pronouncements of eternal beauty and truth

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The Physical Past Who owns the Greek Tradition?

• Schliemann (1822 -1890)
• Ignore all that would contradict making fact of
  fiction
• Even if it means falsifying the facts
• Controlling possession of physical remains
• Carl Humann (1839 - 1896)
• Altar of Zeus
• Pergamon Museum in Berlin

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Possession by Re-reading Re-writing

• Peter Weiss
• Aesthetics of Resistance
• Hercules, Hero of the Proletariat

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Pilgrim Tourist

• Dirk von Petersdorff Sailor

(Some, admittedly, wait for the onset of
the barbarians, Klingons who with their
phasers rekindle our ashes or give the old world
as gift a new mythology).
Burnt eyes, end of the summer. Odysseus as
tourist a rather pathetic formula that I intone,
leaning on the mast. An attempt.
Books underneath the decks, Ithaca calling the
singing of classical modern converges in your
head with the cry of seagulls, hoarse
and meaningless.
ISLE OF ITHACA VOTES FOR TOURISM OVER
TRADITION THE NEW YORK TIMES August 30, 1981
The people of Ithaca, the home of the legendary
hero Odysseus, have voted overwhelmingly in favor
of developing the island's tourist potential,
even at the expense of its traditional
architecture.
By a 71 percent majority in a referendum last
month, the Ithacans called for a reversal of an
Athens Government decision that had included the
island's capital among 400 preserved areas where
construction is severely restricted. The turnout
for the vote was almost 90 percent.
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Tourist Reader Rewriter

• Christa Wolf

So I wanted to go to Greece I began to read
Aeschyluss Oresteia.
It was here. This is where she stood. These stone
lions looked at her now they no longer have
heads.
The sky is still the same, a deep blue block,
high, vast.
The Troy I have in mind is not a description of
by-gone days but a model for a kind of utopia.
Here is the place. These stone lions looked at
her. They seem to move in the shifting light.
The literature of the West (I read) is the white
mans reflection on himself. So should it be
supplemented by the white womans reflection on
herself? And nothing more?
How many realities were there in Troy besides
mine, which I had thought was the only one?
What was there about him Aeneas that might have
touched her more deeply? So, I was transferring
a contemporary ideal to a mythological figure who
cannot possibly have been that kind of person?
Of course. What else?
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Homer and (whose)History?

• Christa Wolf

• Jonathan Shay

The realization that the physical existence of us
all depends on shifts in the delusional thinking
of very small groupsthat is, on chance, to be
sure unhinges the classical aesthetic once and
for all for aesthetics is also rooted in the
question of what can be ascribed to man. But in
the face of modern-day phenomena, awareness of
the incongruousness of words keeps growing. The
thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have
in mind for is is unsayable the language which
would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on
writing in the forms we are used to.
It is difficult for us to imagine how highly
militarized Athenian society was. It was engaged
on six fronts during the year that Aeschylus
produced the Oresteia. I have argued in Achilles
in Vietnam that the process of healing from
combat trauma lies fundamentally in communalizing
it Every day, in the Agora, in the law courts,
on the exercise grounds, Aeschylus would have met
fellow combat veterans. So it would be fair to
ask who exactly were the civilians to veterans
like Aeschylus? With reason, you might argue that
the idea of civilian society was almost
meaningless in his Athens, where in principle
every citizen was a soldier.
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War and Generations

• Walter Jens (born 1923)
• Stefan Schütz (born 1944)
• Michael Köhlmeier (born 1949)

Odysseus Telemachus
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the confrontation of history, that Medusa of the
New World

• Derek Walcott
• Play Odyssey
• Blind Billy Blue

Gone sing bout that man because his stories
please us, Who saw trials and tempests for ten
years after Troy. Im Blind Billy Blue, my main
mans sea-smart Odysseus, Who the God of the Sea
drove crazy and tried to destroy.
The common experience of the New World, even for
the patrician writers whose veneration of the Old
is read as the idolatry of the mestizo, is
colonialism. They know that by openly fighting
tradition we perpetuate it, that revolutionary
literature is a filial impulse, and that maturity
is the assimilation of the features of every
ancestor.
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Omeros
O-meros, she laughed. Thats what we call him
in Greek, stroking the small bust with its
boxers broken nose, and I thought of Seven Seas
sitting near the reek of drying fishnets,
listening to the shallows noise. I saidHomer
and Virg are New England farmers, and the winged
horse guards their gas-station, youre right. I
felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm,
as cold as its marble, then the shoulders in
winter light in the studio attic. I said,
Omeros, and O was the conch-shells
invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our
Antillean patois, os, a grey bone, and the white
surf as it crashes
or a girls throat, I heard a moan from the
village of a blowing conch, and I saw the first
canoe on the horizons glittering scales. The old
age of the wrinkled sea was in that moan, and I
knew that the floating head had drifted here.
The mirrors of the sky were clouded, and I heard
my own voice correcting his name, as the surf
hissed Omeros. The moment I named it, the
marble head arose, fringed with its surf curls
and beard, the hollow shoulders
They kept shifting shapes, or the shapes
metamorphosed so one changed from marble with
a dripping chiton in the early morning on that
harp-wired sand to a foam-headed fisherman in his
white, torn undershirt but both of them had the
look of men whose skins are preserved in salt,
whose accents were born from guttural shoal,
whose vision was wide as rain
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• "Antikerezeption" remains today what it has been
  since the Roman reception of Greek culture the
  creative treatment of the old in order to analyze
  and shape the new.