Harvard University Press Blog

Celebrating Pride Month, Part III

Rounding out our blog posts for Pride Month is an excerpt from Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, which looks at the cost of gay assimilation into mainstream culture and makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear.

Queers face a strange choice: is it better to move on toward a brighter future or to hang back and cling to the past? Such divided allegiances result in contradictory feelings: pride and shame, anticipation and regret, hope and despair. Contemporary queers find ourselves in the odd situation of “looking forward” while we are “feeling backward.”

A particularly jarring version of this disjunction appears in Without You I’m Nothing, John Boskovich’s 1989 film of Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show. In one sequence, Bernhard takes on the persona of a homophobic straight man whose friend takes him to a gay bar. The scene is the 1970s, the height of both sexual liberation and the gay liberation movement. Bernhard’s character begins his monologue looking forward to a night on the town with his best bud and hoping to meet some Playboy bunnies; soon after climbing into his friend’s Camaro, he ends up in an unfamiliar part of town, following his friend into a bar with no girls—or not “his kind of girls” anyway. He notes a “couple dancing together in the corner with flannel shirts and jeans, with big fat asses.” Initially frightened and disgusted by this scene, Bernhard’s character warms up quickly; within a few moments he is doing poppers and mixing with the locals. The story takes a sudden turn as Bernhard begins to play the tambourine, and three black leathermen magically appear at her side, back-up singers for her rendition of the Sylvester anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” The conversion is complete a few moments later: Bernhard’s character gives himself sexually to a drag queen and likes it. In this absurdly sped-up sequence, racial fantasies of overpowering desire and authentic being effect a turn from hatred and shame to joy and self-revelation. The sad and lonely patrons of a backstreet bar are transformed into luminous creatures “here to take you higher!”

This moment is absurd, and yet what is absurd about it is not its content but its pacing. The story is, after all, a familiar one: the movement from abjection to glorious community is the underlying structure of the story of coming out of the closet, and it informs both personal and collective histories of liberation. The origin story of gay liberation describes how on one particular night an underground bar turned into the front line of a struggle for freedom and civil rights. Early work in lesbian and gay studies was marked by the legacy of Stonewall and by the sudden turn of this moment of reverse discourse; the emergent field’s powerful utopianism, affirmation of gay identity, and hope for the future resonated with the seemingly magical power of this new movement to transmute shame into pride, secrecy into visibility, social exclusion into outsider glamour.

I do not think we can or should forego the strategy of reverse discourse, and I would not deny the power of queer alchemy. Our very dependence on this strategy demands, however, that we recognize how tenuous it is. We can turn shame into pride, but we cannot do so once and for all: shame lives on in pride, and pride can easily turn back into shame. We need to take as our starting point the reversibility of reverse discourse and to keep our gaze directed toward the past, toward the bad old days before Stonewall.

Although we cannot do away with the notion of progress, I want to attend more closely to what remains unthought in the turn toward the future. The commitment to affirmation should not shut down the possibility of the kind of radical intellectual experiments that gave birth to queer theory in the first place: Foucault’s challenge to the ideology of liberation; Cherríe Moraga’s attention to betrayal and sexual exposure in Loving in the War Years; Leo Bersani’s critique of the “culture of redemption”; Judith Butler’s gender trouble, which I take to mean not only acting up but also feeling bad.

These interventions are, I would argue, what has made queer studies “queer,” but the vibrations they set off are what is hardest to keep alive in queer studies as it ages. In 1993 Judith Butler wondered if the term “queer” would ever “overcome its constitutive history of injury.” It has not entirely, although its regular appearances in both college classrooms and on popular television shows suggest that it is moving in that direction.…What counts as political in the contemporary context is, however, out of touch with the longer history of queer experience. Rather than disavowing the history of marginalization and abjection, I suggest that we embrace it, exploring the ways it continues to structure queer experience in the present. Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.

Benjamin’s Arcades at 20 Years

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at HUP, reflects on its publication history.

I was asked to join with Howard Eiland, David Rodowick, and Bill Brown at events at Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge last month to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the HUP publication of the translation of the book by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Here, now, it might seem easy to imagine the decision to publish not just The Arcades Project but also the Selected Writings was an easy decision. It was not. HUP has by now published 3,000 pages of the writings of Benjamin. He has become very famous in certain households, a secular saint, the most venerated literary critic in the Western world. But let’s not get carried away. Perhaps you saw Carrie Brownstein try to talk up Benjamin to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show recently, and she drew a blank from him. Benjamin is not a household name yet. People still keep using the Sprockets accent to pronounce his name: Valter Benyamin. But I still have a job, although I can easily imagine that my effort to publish Benjamin, the four volumes of the Selected Writings and The Arcades Project, might have turned out to be Lindsay’s Folly. People might have said: Waters seemed to have a promising career publishing books in economics, philosophy, and literary theory at the University of Minnesota Press. With almost no resources at his disposal, Waters, at his Little House on the Prairie, in a cinder block building hard by the wellspring of the Mississippi River, beside the bleachers where the Golden Gophers played football, did well enough. And then he came to Harvard where there were serious resources for publishing. He wasted them trying to revive a forgotten schlemihl who’d failed his PhD qualifying exams. Lindsay’s Folly and his ending, RIP.

Didn’t turn out that way. The twentieth anniversary of the publication of this huge tome might be a moment to stop and catch a breath. There is still more of his work that needs translating and editing. The hunger for his writing has only grown and grown, as Eric Banks’s essay “Walter Benjamin’s Afterlife” in the Chronicle of Higher Education of March 21, 2014, lays out how Benjamin’s name has grown since the time he died until today—grown from nearly no references for forty years to a high of 775 references in 2007. His close friends, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, had worked hard to keep his name alive after his death in 1940. Adorno had arranged for the publication in 1950 of perhaps his most appealing work, his masterpiece in fact, his Berlin Childhood around 1900, in a deluxe slipcase edition with the case covered with a watercolor of the River Spree coursing through Berlin in the early twentieth century. It did not sell.

But a two-volume selection of his essays appeared in Frankfurt in 1955, the Schriften, and two volumes appeared in English from Harcourt Brace, and that led to a major essay by Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker, which won him additional readers. However, another essay by Arendt published in Der Merkur for January/February 1968, along with an essay by Helmut Heissenbüttel, reviewed the volumes Schriften and Briefe so critically that it caused Adorno to protest for himself and Scholem that “she would make us who alone kept him above water into his murderers.” But the two volumes of Schriften found readers in Europe, including Paul de Man, who was teaching at Zurich in the ’60s and who was the person from whom I learned decisively that people should begin to learn more about Benjamin’s writings. DeMan influenced me primarily by how much he changed his critical practice after he turned against Heidegger and Benjamin replaced him as his critical lodestar. I think primarily of the way de Man seized upon what Benjamin wrote about the facies hippocratica in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. But then I explored more and realized there was much, much more to Benjamin.

He was a veritable critical Atlantis, a buried island, a buried civilization under water in need of recovery, which it became my job to resurrect with help. When we began to talk with Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp Verlag about seriously publishing Benjamin in English at Harvard, just after I moved to Harvard from Minnesota in 1984, he wrote me on September 20, 1984, and gave me a proposition for a plan. In that plan, he suggested almost as an afterthought that we publish “a selection of the Passagen-Werk, which reduces the text to less than half.”

When we took the plan of Unseld for the Selected Writings and developed it, we presented it to the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics with numerous letters of support. At the Syndics discussion, sociologist Daniel Bell became its champion and fended off objections about why we should publish the writings of a homeless man who’d never finished his dissertation and never wrote a proper book. The series of the Selected Writings began to appear in 1996. There were two critical issues to solve: should we publish the entire Passagen-Werk and how should we talk about it when we presented it to the world, as an unfinished and incomplete work or as a complete work?

Since we are celebrating The Arcades—Das Passagen-Werk in English—at twenty, let me recall its inception. I can see from the HUP records that the Press made a distinct decision to publish the PW in its entirety after we got the Selected Writings moving. I cannot remember exactly how this happened, but it makes sense that it did, because doing so meant going beyond what was suggested to the Press by Siegfried Unseld, and to do so was going to take a special effort. I presented the project to the Syndics in June 1988. We had presented to them in March 1985 the preliminary plans for an edition of the selected writings of Walter Benjamin. At that time Syndic Daniel Bell had “advocated a fuller selection, one that would give a better sense of the man and all the facets of his thought.”

The discussion of the PW translation with the Syndics led the Press to commit to translate the complete book as originally published in German in 1982, and the scholarly reports provided the guidance for how to talk about the book in publishing it. The then Harvard professor T.J. Clark argued that the Press should decide to publish the book, because this decision was on the same order as Penguin’s decision, “a decade or so ago, to do Marx’s Grundrisse in English.” He added, “The comparison is not frivolous, it’s very close. In both cases we have to do with a long, unfinished piece of writing, obviously in some sense ‘work in progress,’ and difficult to translate. In both cases it is the sheer stature of the writer, and the crucial place of the text in his work, that makes it essential that the text enter the English language. In one sense, the case is even stronger with Benjamin, since the Passagen-Werk is his Capital—for better or worse.”

Tim Clark’s advice to the Press was prescient. The book turned out to be not a white elephant, a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. That this publication would not turn out to be Lindsay’s Folly was testified to by the appearance in the New York Times for January 16, 2000, of a front-page story in the “Arts & Leisure” section by Hubert Muschamp that began this way: “Some of us don’t read fiction. We live on history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called belles-lettres. We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects for years to come.” Our book was on its way to being recognized as a modernist masterpiece, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Dylan’s The Basement Tapes—all these “unfinished” works that were as finished as their composers could make them before they died.  The debate Mike Jennings, Howard Eiland, and I had among ourselves was how to handle the unfinished nature of The Arcades. Once we published our edition, Mike argued that we should republish the book in the order that some researchers had discovered, but we decided not to do that. Stanley Cavell seems to me to have captured the truth of the matter when he declared inArtforumof the book Suhrkamp and we published: its incompleteness “strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity.” In this book, Benjamin wrote that in shopping malls he had discovered the secret history of the bourgeoisie and liberated the suppressed history that lays underneath the ideological masks. The greatest single testimony to the effectiveness of the book is a book that mimics it in its essentials, right down to duplicating the Parisian arcades with the Parisian Palais-Royal, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch. We did not know what we had on our hands when we began to publish Benjamin, but it turned out to be something great.

Remembering Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the literary critic who championed the Western canon, died at age 89 last month. Lindsay Waters, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities, looks back on their publishing history, their friendship, and Bloom’s great contributions to the literary community.

Harold always lived at 179 Linden, New Haven. Always. “Send the book to my home address. Do you have it? Are you sure? I really need that book.” “Yes. Have it. Will do.” So it’s hard, almost impossible, to remember that he and Jeannie almost moved to Cambridge, Mass. For years no name said Yale as forcefully and clearly as Harold Bloom. I first met Harold when he and nearly the whole Yale School of Critics picked me up at the New Haven Amtrak station in 1981 so I could have lunch—not with all of them, dear God!—but with Paul de Man. Paul could drive, but he did not drive so well, as all the dents and nicks in his car made clear. Harold could not drive at all; Jeannie did. Even then it felt a lot like I was being picked up by all the Marx Brothers, everyone doing their own schtick; looking back to that moment feels funny, fills me with nostalgia.

But back to that moment: I’d been picked up by Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, and Groucho, but my lunch date was with de Man. Still, there they all were—Paul, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, the heart of the group, missing only Hillis Miller—in a car driven by Renee, Geoffrey’s wife. So they picked me up and drove Paul and me to lunch, not at cozy Naples Pizza, a favorite of Yale Comp Lit, but at Mory’s, a place that might have been as comfortable as Naples when it originated in 1849. Was de Man trying to impress me by taking me to “the tables down at Mory’s”? That was not like him, but who knows? Maybe. The rest of them disappeared. How perfect! I’d already published the new edition of Paul’s Blindness and Insight. Paul and I were in business together. We’d met in Chicago and Minneapolis before. I remember during our lunch at Mory’s asking him about Hans Robert Jauss, for whose book he had just written the introduction for the THL series. I asked him if he thought Jauss, whom I was about to publish, was the equivalent of Erich Auerbach. He tried gently to lower my expectations. In fact, de Man’s introduction had itself been a subtle skewering of Jauss. I did not know Paul so well, as well as I’d come to know him. And I had no idea how close de Man was to Bloom.

Harold’s name was synonymous with Yale for me as a humanities editor from the University of Minnesota Press—Harold, as I said, not a member of the Bush family or William F. Buckley, Jr., author of once-famous God and Man at Yale and then famous for his TV show Firing Line, and a hero to my mother, a conservative Catholic. A few years later, after Paul had died in 1983, I had business with Harold. This would have been 1987, the year Harold gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and dallied in false surmise, to use a Miltonism, the false surmise being that he might move to Harvard. He negotiated for months with Derek Bok, Harvard’s president, and then decided against moving. I would experience the complications of negotiating with Harold several times. Nothing was too small to fuss over. But the very chance that he might move and the fact that he was delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard helped make the year 1987–1988 a very exciting one for many of us in Cambridge. Those lectures, after touch-and-go negotiations with Harvard University Press director Arthur J. Rosenthal, a publisher as exciting in his own behavior as Professor Bloom, became the book Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (HUP, 1989). What we did not know when Bloom delivered the lectures, and what he probably did not know himself then, was that the book would be the trial run, the off-Broadway tryouts, for what would become his most famous book of the more than fifty books he wrote: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994).

When he accepted the commission to deliver the six Norton Lectures, Harold told Derek Bok that he would not take up the residency at Harvard normally required of the Norton lecturer. “I told them I’d come up for one day only for each lecture over the course of six weeks.” But, having bargained Bok into an arrangement that would see him at Harvard for only six days, Harold in effect moved up to Cambridge for the entire academic year! He was everywhere. We could not get rid of Harold. If the mountain would not move to Bloom, Bloom moved his mountainous self and enterprises with him for a year.

Why is The Western Canon so like Ruin the Sacred Truths? “I write only one book,” before lapsing into deli talk from the Lower East Side: “It is like a very long sausage. I cut off so much here and so much there.” This was, as I said, the trial run for the Broadway show. Harold delivered his pre-Broadway performance at Harvard’s great Memorial Hall, the building constructed to honor the Harvard grads who had died in the Civil War. Think of The Western Canon as Paradise Lost and Ruin the Sacred Truths as the “brief epic” Paradise Regained.

Keep in mind that picture of the Yale Critics crammed into a car—making room for one another to fit—because, although Harold Bloom might seem like the ultimate lone literary superstar, he was, I’d contend, and that is the point of this remembrance of him, always a team player, someone who thrived best when he struck up alliances with others, and those others did not need to be like-minded to become enlisted in his work. Michael Dirda wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Bloom has always been, to echo Kipling, a cat that walks by himself” (Oct. 11, 2019), but I beg to differ. In fact, he ground out much more sausage, if you will, when he had others around him to spice it up.

For all his weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—all his kvetching about the ruination of the American academy—he kept at his lectern until the end, until just before he died, in fact. Inside the university he had lifelong relations with many, and especially with some. I bring as evidence for what I am contending information about two special people in particular, Paul de Man and Angus Fletcher. He loved John Hollander and Richard Rorty, and he admired Mark Edmundson and David Bromwich. He did not have much use for some famous colleagues. Some had no use for him. I have somewhere a list of the people in the department who voted to deny him tenure. He was unusual, and he had a taste for the unusual. For example, he was inspired by Victoria Nelson, someone whose work I introduced him to, and he was devoted to her books and supported my publishing two of them, one of which, The Secret Life of Puppets (2002), won the MLA prize for best book in comp lit despite the author’s lack of professional credentials.

He would have been categorized by many as a literary theorist, especially since helping to develop the books Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) and Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). But he was not, I’d contend, a theorist like his great friends de Man and Fletcher, and he acknowledged this repeatedly. He was a lover of poetry with a photographic memory. He was also a critic, one who could say what he loved and why, like Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. He was what Nelson George calls “a hanging critic,” someone who would condemn what he did not like, as he did Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, Jorie Graham, and J. K. Rowling, to name some of those he strongly criticized.

But his connections with Paul and Angus were deeper, abiding, and loving. Harold writes in The Western Canon about how the “long, frequently irascible relationship between Quixote and Sancho is the greatness of the book” (131). This captures the relationships between Bloom and de Man and Bloom and Fletcher. Bloom was hardly a solitary. He was not Hamlet, standing alone on the battlement. As he said, he was Falstaff at loving war with Hal.

Harold always maintained that there was one person superior to him in his generation, and that was Angus. They’d met when they were each starting graduate school in English at Yale in September 1951. As he tells the story, Harold wandered disconsolately into the lounge of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale, where he heard a “vigorous performance of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Piano. Sitting down, I listened to its percussive splendor being played by a yellow cowlick bobbing up and down behind the piano.” Beneath that cowlick was “a splendid Scottish youth,” as he wrote in a foreword to the Princeton edition of Fletcher’s Allegory (2012). In one of the two books Bloom published in 2019, he gave repeated testimonials to Angus’s friendship and mind. He wrote, “Of all the literary critics of my own generation, I was always most allied to Angus. I cannot accept that he is gone” (Possessed by Memory, 343). In this book he praised Angus for being in tune with the natural world. There is truth to this. But I believe the deeper reason for their ongoing friendship was that Angus was much more of a thinker than Harold ever was, and that in their nearly daily phone calls to discuss each other’s writing, Angus pushed and probed and forced the fanciful Bloom to make his writing walk on the earth and engage in argument. Harold wrote a stunning blurb to describe Angus for the cover of his HUP book Colors of the Mind: “He is an Orphic seer, a curious universal scholar of Renaissance vintage, a fusion of the best traits of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, his true peers.” This tribute sounds great and stirring, but it misses the way Angus continually sliced through Harold’s verbiage. No wonder Angus loved Harry Frankfurt’s book on bullshit! I, too, had the experience of Angus’s continually and sharply cutting through my waffling. I am sure he tried to cut through Harold’s, too. And if those books of Harold’s speak to general readers, as it is clear many of them do, it is, I’d contend, because of how Angus in effect edited them working over the phone with Harold.

If Harold argued with Angus, he argued just as much with Paul de Man. De Man loved Walter Benjamin; Harold did not—he loved Walter Pater. In a story Harold told me in 1996, he recounted how once upon a time he ran into Paul at the Yale Coop. Harold was teaching Freud that day and was carrying five or six books by Freud to his class. Paul laughed at him when he saw him juggling the stack of books, and asked: “Why are you carrying the contents of the Sterling Library to your class?” Paul was carrying one slim book of Walter Benjamin’s essays! Paul laughed at Harold for being so devoted to Freud, not that he disbelieved Freud, but he thought all Freud said was common sense. What really upset Harold about Paul was the way he taught and how he created magic circles of acolytes around himself. There was something mystical and mystifying about his teaching style that caused students to grant him some inexplicable control over them. He complained to me that he loved Paul but did not love his effect upon me: for too long I did not understand that I was too devoted to him.

When people rose against de Man after the discovery that he had written for a collaborationist newspaper in 1942, and then others kept coming forward to attack him with more sensational charges, Harold never disowned him. He remembered Derrida calling him to tell him dramatically that “we must fight” to save our friend’s reputation. What Bloom said to me was that he’d have nothing to do with such fights. “What happened is between the soul of our late friend and God, if there is a God. I consider the attacks on him to be an offense and obnoxious. My thought is that nothing in the attacks is untrue and none of it matters. The wild publications reveal a certain astonishing lack of responsibility.”

I remember that when Adam Begley wrote a profile of Harold for the New York Times Magazine and I was quoted as having a favorable opinion of Harold, a Harvard colleague wrote to tell me he was surprised to read that. I knew that many people were suspicious of Harold. I had my own questions about some of his work, but in the battle about literature and politics that emerged in the 1980s and has continued unabated, I was always on his side. He remained a true friend to my best friends de Man and Fletcher, and he revered and supported other friends and authors Miriam Hansen and Victoria Nelson. He was a champion of literature. I will miss him.

Alcibiades in the Shadow of Achilles

Alcibiades—the famously handsome Athenian, ward of Pericles, friend and pupil of Socrates, and charismatic general infamous for serial disloyalty—was one of the most remarkable figures of the Golden Age of Athens. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, David Stuttard gives us a riveting account of the man and his age, “bringing to singing life,” per Paul Cartledge, “the mercurial, magnetic, passionate, and persuasive personality of this still hugely controversial Athenian aristocrat of the fifth century BC.” In what follows below, a slightly condensed version of his recent British Museum presentation on the book, Stuttard introduces us to one of ancient Greece’s most fascinating and slippery characters.

-----

I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts.

Here, from my book, is what happened next:

Fully awake now, fully alert, Alcibiades leapt out of bed and threw the door wide open. Outside, stacks of dried wood had been piled high, and the flames were already tearing through them. Shouting to the people in the house to help, he dragged out rugs and mattresses and blankets, and flung them on the fire. The flames were smothered. At least for the time being. But now the smoke was bellying, and tongues of fire were licking at the edges of the blankets, and the orange heat was growing more intense. And then the arrows came. From all directions. Thudding into walls and roof and earth. Anonymous and deadly. The only warning of their approach a soft sighing of air.

The household was panic-stricken as Alcibiades, his instincts kicking in, reached for his weapons. But they had disappeared. Somehow in the night someone had taken them. All that he had now was a short knife, which a comrade pressed into his hand. But no shield. No armour. Just a blanket wrapped around his left arm as he stood, poised on the threshold. And then, calling to his friend to follow him, he bellowed his war cry and ran, naked and exposed, out into the darkness. Silhouetted against the burning house, he made an easy target. From all around him javelins rained and arrows thumped like hail as first one, then another, then another found its mark. All Alcibiades could do was run into the night, and run, and keep on running while he could, until the night engulfed him.

That description’s based meticulously on ancient sources, but all seems so theatrical, so filmic, so larger than life. But political assassinations can be larger than life, and Alcibiades’ life was every bit as complex and nail-biting as any modern political thriller.

Alcibiades was born bang in the middle of the fifth century BC, in 452 in Athens, a city that nearly sixty years before had expelled a hated ruler and established the most radical participatory democracy the world had ever seen. His mother’s family and his father’s were wealthy aristocrats from powerful families whose members numbered famous politicians, winners in Olympic chariot races, decorated war heroes—and, go back far enough, even Homeric heroes of the Trojan War. And when Alcibiades’ father, Cleinias, was killed in battle, the five-year-old boy was looked after by the most powerful politician of his day, the equally aristocratic Pericles, whose policy shaped democratic Athens, whose dream inspired the Parthenon, whose ambition was for the Athenian Empire to rule the waves.

From Latin Fragments to Greek Medicine

New year, new Loebs! Below, Loeb Classical Library General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the latest additions to what critic Adam Kirsch calls “one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship.”

-----

This season brings another exciting set of volumes for the Loeb Classical Library. A two-volume edition of Quintus Ennius (fl. ca. 204–169), the “father of Latin literature,” by Sander M. Goldberg and Gesine Manuwald (LCL 294, 537) inaugurates Fragmentary Republican Latin (FRL), a monumental new series in twelve volumes (as currently projected) that is the first Loeb Classical Library project with its own series editor (Manuwald) and one that will surely be an even more indispensable resource for all readers of Roman literature than its predecessor, Eric H. Warmington’s Remains of Old Latin (ROL) in four volumes. On the Greek side, the Library adds three new works by Galen to its growing collection of the great physician’s fundamental texts: Hygiene, Thrasybulus, and On Exercise with a Small Ball (LCL 535, 536). Meanwhile, John Yardley’s new edition of the third and fourth decades of Livy’s History of Rome proceeds apace with volume X, containing books 35–37 (LCL 301).

Remains of Old Latin (1935–40) was an outstanding achievement, masterfully collecting and organizing a broad range of material, making much of it available in a modern language for the first time, and supplying annotation at once concise and rich. ROL was nevertheless atypical of its era for featuring fragmentary texts, however important their authors. After all, the concept of scattered quotations from or paraphrases of texts subsequently lost as “fragments,” and an interest in collecting and organizing them, date only from the early modern period, especially the 19th century. Until fairly recently, fragments resided in forbiddingly specialized editions and were rarely encountered outside of footnotes, much less in translation. But that is changing, as many recent Loeb Classical Library editions illustrate, not least the landmark Early Greek Philosophy published last fall in nine volumes (LCL 524–532). The decision to replace Warmington’s venerable ROL recognized the need for substantial revision and rearrangement of the existing material; the inclusion of additional authors and genres; and the incorporation of current methodological awareness of the complex nature of fragments, their transmitting contexts, and the limitations they present for analyzing and appreciating the works of which they were once a part.

Much as Early Greek Philosophy abandoned the traditional but misleading title “Presocratics,” the new title Fragmentary Republican Latin not only avoids the unappetizing connotations of “remains” and “old,” but also reflects a much larger scope and ambition: FRL includes not only all verbatim citations of the respective authors and literary genres but also paraphrases and indirect comments, as well as the testimonia on lives and individual works. Projected to be included along with Ennius are Pacuvius and Accius as well as the tragic incerta; Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Caecilius Statius as well as the comic and dramatic incerta; the togata, Atellana, and mime; Lucilius and other political invective and popular verse; most testimonia and fragments from Roman Republican orators; most testimonia and fragments from Roman Republican historians; a selection of lyric, elegiac, and hexameter poetry; and selected inscriptions, including the Twelve Tables. Fragmentary works by authors of whom complete pieces are also extant will not be part of this collection; thus fragments of Varro, Cato, and of course Cicero will be added to the editions of their surviving works. FRL volumes will appear successively over the next few years.

Frankenstein, Born January 1, 1818, Still Alive

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, and arguably our greatest tale of horror. Below, Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao, whose widely celebrated annotated edition of the novel we published in 2012, reflect on Shelley’s creation, Frankenstein’s “Creature,” and the work’s lasting cultural legacy.

-----

Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published January 1, 1818, and since then has never been out of print, or out of range. The range is more than the book: it is a fable and a language. On December 21, 2017 (the darkest night of the year), Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, denounced the recently passed unilateral tax bill this way: “It’s a Frankenstein. Anybody who’s familiar with Frankenstein knows it was… a monster that was created… Do you know the ending of Mary Shelley’s story?” she exclaimed. “The monster comes back to destroy.” Her reference needs some nuance: Frankenstein was the creator, not the creation. And the creation was not “a monster,” but deemed so on the basis of a physical appearance outside or beyond the normative range. And the Creature (let’s call him) was abandoned and abused, and miserably lonely, before he became a vengeful destroyer. Such reservations aside, we can marvel at the readiness of the reference, needing no footnote 200 years on: who is not “familiar with Frankenstein”?

The novel main-titled Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The publication of 1818 was anonymous, from a down-market press. It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. She proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage confection at London’s Royal Opera House in August—running for nearly 40 nights in this debut. Scarcely a month goes by now without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events.

The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Victor Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-seller Reflections on the Revolution in France recoiled at the new France as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, raged against “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, pointed out that the system of monarchy was an “artificial monster,” a “luxurious monster,” and its despots a “race of monsters in human shape.”

The language of “monster” had another stage, with heightened interest in the era of the rights of man, when large populations of human beings were systematically brutalized. With much controversy, and against the lobbying of wealthy plantation owners, England outlawed participation in the slave trade in 1807; but slavery in its colonies was legal until 1833. (Frankenstein reaches its third and most popular edition in 1831). Who was a “monster”? Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and slave-masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Defenders of slavery cast the Africans as monsters: subhuman, improvable perhaps by conversion to Christianity and disciplined work, but a threat, especially the men, if freed. “In dealing with the negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength…would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” The reference was transparently Frankenstein, not only the novel but also the recent stage-plays, which stripped the Creature of the eloquent and moving language Mary Shelley wrote for him, and rendered the familiar or cinematic tradition: a mute, lumbering, physical threat.

“A Masterpiece of Scholarly Production”

In the spring of 2016 we published a major new edition of Emily Dickinson’s verse, the only extant volume of Dickinson’s complete poems that distinguishes between those she delicately preserved in her storied fascicles and those she treated with somewhat less care. Painstakingly edited by Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller, the book is also the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poems, as well as the first edition to include the alternative words and phrases Dickinson wrote on the pages of many of the poems she retained.

To have produced such a lovely and invaluable resource is its own reward, but we’re nonetheless extremely pleased to share that the Modern Language Association of America has named Miller’s volume co-winner of its biennial MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. The prize committee’s citation for the book reads:

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is a masterpiece of scholarly production, from layout and design to content. Cristanne Miller demonstrates how engaging with the materiality of the poems leads to new knowledge about the poet and her work. The care and attention given to the intricacies involved in Dickinson’s textual productions are striking. The clean presentation of the poems on the page allows readers to see the alternative phrasings with ease, and the introduction presents a welcome overview of Dickinson’s writing practices and the ways in which her work has been edited in the past. This outstanding edition helps make clear the complexity of Dickinson’s habits and how they have affected our understanding of her poetry.

From the beginning, we recognized the value of placing this edition alongside the open access Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA), on which we’d partnered with Amherst College, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and a host of other institutions. On our website, we produced an index to Miller’s volume from which one can jump directly to the high-resolution images of the fascicles presented at EDA, allowing readers not only to read Dickinson’s poems “as she preserved them,” but actually to see those preservations themselves.

Our congratulations to Cristanne Miller on this well-deserved recognition for her wonderful work.

“Reminder: Race Is Not a Costume”

In an effort to help forestall the donning of racist Halloween costumes, Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. took the time last week to explain the painful history of blackface and minstrel shows. He was joined in that effort by none other than CUNY Professor Eric Lott, whose writing and thinking have been absolutely critical to our understanding of racial fantasy in American culture for decades, from 1993’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, to Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, which we published this fall.

Have a look at Wood and Lott’s breakdown of the ways in which the mindlessly offensive racial costuming we see each Halloween is rooted in the history and politics of slavery:

In her 1993 review of the “terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely” Love and Theft, author and critic Margo Jefferson expressed the hope that Lott would pursue the threads of this American racial identity crisis into the twentieth century. With Black Mirror, that’s exactly what he’s done. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Lott explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital—including and above all blackface—to reproduce white cultural dominance, threatening in the process to betray the racial hegemony that generated those institutions and that they exist in order to maintain.

Humans and Nature, Hopelessly Entangled

Henry David Thoreau, born two hundred years ago today, is known for his stay on Walden Pond but at heart was really one for rivers. So argues Robert Thorson in The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which shows just how deeply Thoreau’s thinking and writing were connected to paddling and sailing. Thorson’s presentation of Thoreau as a data-driven environmental scientist also gives us a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, an outdoorsman deeply attuned to the ways in which mankind was reshaping the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly, from today’s vantage, Thoreau regarded that reshaping not as pure debasement, but as the unavoidable entwining of human actions with natural processes, a snarl that heightened conditions for his beloved boating, among many other effects. In the passage below, adapted from The Boatman’s Conclusion, Thorson gives us a Thoreau determined to both appreciate the benefits and diminish the detriment of that hopeless entangling.

-----

Concord’s makeover began when English colonials arrived to create a religiously based communal village on the banks of this lush river meadow. Historian Brian Donahue proved that theirs was a largely sustainable agrarian culture. Yet within a decade they were trying to reengineer their “Great River” landscape by ditching its bedrock outlet. When that failed for lack of technology, they explored the possibility of diverting floodwaters eastward through the meadows of Thoreau’s birthplace, over the watershed divide, and into the Shawsheen Valley. Their pioneering efforts inaugurated more than two centuries of human “improvements” driven by an exponentially rising American population and improved technologies. Maximum development—agricultural land conversions and industrial hydropower development—occurred in Thoreau’s generation. By the time of his death, virtually every square inch of the land had been transformed in some way: rock to quarry, river to canal, brook to millstream, wood to fuel, land to pasture, and field to cropland. The entire valley had become a network of dams, canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories, town streets, and country roads.

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”

Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Since the dawn of antiquity, rivers, even more so than coasts, have been the primary battlefields in this war. The U.S. Geological Survey, acting through the U.S. National Research Council, summarized the situation in 2007: “Deforestation, industrialization, urbanization, floodplain cultivation, dams and levee construction, and channelization have altered dramatically natural flow regimes.” Thoreau, by the end of his life, had encountered all of these disruptions and disconnections in his own field studies.

Loebs New and New Again

June saw the publication of four new Loeb Classical Library volumes, a batch consisting of two revisions to earlier works and two new additions to the corpus. Below, General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the offerings.

-----

Following the release in fall 2016 of the extraordinary Early Greek Philosophy in nine volumes (LCL 524–532), the Loeb Classical Library catalog for spring 2017 resumes a more typical pattern: two volumes of works new to the Library and two replacement volumes, one each of Latin and Greek. Yet this catalog is not so typical in longer historical perspective: each volume in its own way exemplifies significant adjustments to James Loeb’s original plan for the Library that have been developed over the past half-century in order to preserve the viability and maintain the vitality of his vision for new generations of readers.

Loeb aimed “to include all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature” and so imagined a moment when the Library would be complete, which almost came to pass in the 1970s as a solution (however unwelcome) to the financial challenges of that era. Instead, there were prospects for a new dawn: the roster of works that count as valuable and interesting is not an immutable or finite canon, but one that changes and expands in each successive generation. Nor are existing volumes immortal, as even the most solid ones inevitably grow outdated in one way or another. And so, the LCL embarked on a massive revaluation project to grade each existing edition for retention, revision, or replacement, and to add such new editions as would likely be received as valuable and interesting. Accordingly, new authors and works continue to be added, but revisions and replacements appear at an equal pace: over 25% of the Library’s editions have already been revised or replaced, and in many cases expanded by adding lesser-known or fragmentary works.

The idea of systematic revision was already in the air when General Editor Eric Warmington decided to revise Heseltine’s edition of Petronius in 1969 (LCL 15), as soon as the relaxation of obscenity laws in the US allowed (the UK had acted a decade earlier), and the de-bowdlerization of the Library has continued apace. Similarly for archaic or otherwise dated styles: Edmonds’ 1912 edition of the Greek Bucolic Poets, among other outdated features, claimed allegiance to the “fain/twain school” and used regional dialect or “colloquial suburban” to represent characters in the mimes, is virtually unreadable today and was finally replaced in 2015 by Neil Hopkinson’s fine and pellucid Theocritus. Moschus. Bion (LCL 28). By contrast, Way’s 1913 edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus (LCL 19), though it features a very stilted iambic pentameter translation, was deemed in the Loeb assessment of 1991 not to warrant replacement on the grounds that such a translation is “what this poetaster deserves” and that the existence of Vian’s sound text was “hardly sufficient to justify a new edition of this boring writer.” But here, as often, times and tastes have changed, so that Hopkinson’s replacement of the Way edition is scheduled to appear next year.

Many other factors come into play when deciding whether to revise or replace an edition, for example the existence of a better critical edition on which to base the text, the quality and currency of the scholarship, the level of annotation, or the adequacy of the front and back matter; the first volume of de Melo’s Plautus (LCL 60) has a 120-page Introduction versus the 8 pages offered by its predecessor, a decision prompted largely by the lack elsewhere of a similar overview for Anglophone readers.

Both new editions in the spring 2017 catalog contain works from the second century AD: the first volume of Michael Trapp’s edition of Aelius Aristides’ Orations (LCL 533), and Christopher P. Jones’ Apologia, Florida, and De Deo Socratis of Apuleius (LCL 534), which together with the Metamorphoses (LCL 44, 453) complete our coverage of that author’s genuine works. Although this era of the “Second Sophistic” was exceptionally prolific on both the Roman and the Greek sides, intellectually and artistically rich and varied, and crucially important in the transmission of classicism, it had been for the most part the preserve of specialists until a recent renewal of interest began to equip the rest of us to understand and appreciate its riches. These works by Aelius Aristides and Apuleius, two of the most distinctive and celebrated figures of their time, join other recent and forthcoming additions by Philostratus (LCL 521) and Galen (LCL 523, 535, 536) to help fill out our picture of an important era.

The other two volumes for spring 2017 replace existing volumes, which are thus retired from both the print and the digital Library: Emlyn Jones’ and Preddy’s new Plato, volume I (LCL 36) replaces Harold North Fowler’s edition of 1914, and J. C. Yardley’s new Livy, volume IX (LCL 295) replaces Evan T. Sage’s edition of 1935. The decision to revise or replace differs in each individual case and then depends on finding the right editor to (re-)do both text and translation. In both these cases, replacement was surely merited. Fowler’s Plato lacked a solid foundation for revision: its text had long been superseded, its translation was dated and often inaccurate, its 10-page introduction was minimal and unhelpful, there were no explanatory notes, and Phaedrus does not belong with Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. (Phaedrus is now slated to be included with two other dialogues on love and literature, Lysis and Symposium, in a forthcoming replacement of LCL 166.) Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, who had recently replaced our edition of Plato’s Republic (LCL 237, 276), were happily ready to repair these deficiencies, and continue to assist us in our long-term efforts to update our twelve volumes of Plato.

An even more massive replacement project is inaugurated by Yardley’s new volume of Livy, whose complete LCL edition is currently in fourteen volumes. Livy presents a special challenge insofar as his monumental History of Rome begins with the city’s foundation and continues down into his own era in the age of Augustus, thus requiring editorial expertise spanning multiple historical periods. Hence our original edition, begun in 1919 and completed in 1959, was divided among four editors: B. O. Foster for Books 1–22 (LCL 114, 133, 172, 191, 233), Frank Gardner Moore for Books 23–30 (LCL 355, 367, 381), the aforementioned Evan T. Sage for Books 31–42 (LCL 295, 301, 313, 332) and his collaborator on volume XII Alfred Cary Schlesinger for Books 43–45, etc. (LCL 396, 404). Each of these volumes is a product of its time, and needs updating for various reasons. Yardley’s LCL volumes of Livy’s third and fourth decades, based on Briscoe’s new critical edition, initiate our efforts to convey Livy’s meaning to the Anglophone reader more uniformly and accurately, with much fuller annotation in line with current scholarship. (We began with the fourth decade while we awaited the publication of the final books of Briscoe’s edition of the third.) Yardley, a veteran translator of Livy, is just the right scholar to set the overall tone for this undertaking, and even as his new LCL volumes will replace Sage’s, so too will replacements for the existing LCL volumes by Foster, Gardner Moore, and Schlesinger follow in due course.