Joy Connolly's abstract

first installment (fall 1999)

One issue that comes to mind is the aesthetic angle on Virgil, particularly the Eclogues, poems that have preoccupied me for a while now. Briefly, here are three things that I think are connected in interesting ways but haven't yet had time to write about.

First, art historical analysis of classical art, which throughout the middle decades of this century fostered a strange and crippling attitude toward Roman copies of Greek originals -- such that art historians trained themselves and their students to "look through" the Roman versions until they could see the Greek originals, in a frankly mystical mode. This is in part driven, I think (here's my second item) by Modernist, and specifically anti-representational, developments in the twentieth- century art world, as classical art historians (along a track also followed by scholars of classical literature) experience a collective drive to present classical art as the representational salvation of western art, in response to the muddles and trends created by the fertile new non-representational artforms. The problem of the Roman copies then becomes paramount: what to do with the fact that the perfection of the Greek representation of the human body can only be
perceived via the "stiff mimicry" of the Romans? The idolatry of representational perfection runs into material trouble -- or so they seem to have thought. Third: how might all this have intersected with/influenced the aesthetics of mid-century New Critical readings of Latin literature, specifically Virgil? Here the newly intensified idolatry of the pastoral is closely linked to both external politics (mentioned in your description) and with contemporary developments in poetry (my knowledge extends only to American and English poetry, I'm afraid; I'm sure there's plenty more to be said about continental writing). But -- as with Roman sculpture and painting -- there are problems with setting Virgil up as a classical ideal, many of them involved with his identity as a Roman copier, and this is especially problematic for the Theocritean Eclogues. So while the whole High Modernist crew in France in the teens through the 30s is thinking in very neoteric terms, Pound (to take one example) starts to write popular diatribes throughout the late 40s, 50s and 60s against Virgil and Latin poetry in general, and his quotations of Ovid, so prominent in the early Cantos, diminish in the late ones. Classicists' attempts to frame the Eclogues in utopian terms, I think, are in some way responding to this kind of thing as well.

second installment (fall 2000)

What I'm doing now is placing the midcentury growth of critical interest in Vergil in the context of the radical political quietism encouraged by New Criticism and its methods (some more recent developments in poststructuralist analysis are obviously relevant here too, but beyond the scope of the paper: hopefully good
stimulus for discussion). The twist is that instead of reading New Critical approaches to the Eclogues in the light of literary Modernism (Eliot and Pound were in my sights originally), I'm examining the connections between New Criticism and the artworld. Specifically what interests me is the desire of American Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists like Reinhardt, Motherwell, and Stella, to privilege form, unity, paradox, tension -- all those New Critical keywords -- in their undisguised effort to create an art of disengagement and "social meaninglessness." In that sense twentieth-century art offers a meta-commentary on art and its social function -- appropriating politics via negation -- while effectively turning its back on political action. This is where the Eclogues play a really interesting role: the way postwar Latinists increasingly begin to see them (in the wake of the Expressionists, chronologically speaking) as insistently self-contained aesthetic objects that successfully, simultaneously incorporate and distance or negate politics. So the Eclogues address political realities but in an Arcadian "otherworld"; "politics are inscribed in poems that have become their own concern," to paraphrase Iser; they become poems of "enclosure", or numerological problems to be solved (this latter approach eerily reminiscent of the Expressionists' self-descriptions as aesthetic "problem-solvers"). I'm not claiming a direct causal relation between the artworld and Classics, of course, but rather trying to historicize and question what the XXth century has been accustomed to see as "natural" oppositions in the Eclogues, between aesthetics and history, Arcadia and Rome.