Joseph Farrell, "The Vergilian Century"

My paper will develop and defend the thesis presented in the prospectus for this conference. The most salient points are as follows:
 
  1. Criticism of Vergil, and of the Aeneid in particular, was the principal driving force behind the development of Latin literary studies during the twentieth century.
  2. The main questions addressed by Vergilians and the main ways in which they went about answering those questions, were shaped more by modern historical events than by forces internal to the discipline of Latin studies.
  3. The development of "pessimistic" interpretations of Vergil's work in the second half of the century was not, as some of its opponents have charged, an anachronism caused by New Left politics. Rather, the extreme polarization of Vergilian criticism into rival camps of "optimists" and "pessimists" was caused by an excessively polarized political climate brought on by, first, the rise of totalitarian states and, second, the rivalry between the two superpowers throughout the period of the Cold War.
I will draw further parallels between the political situation. the rise of New Critical reading strategies, with their emphasis on carefully balanced tensions within the work of verbal art, and the hegemony of American Vergilians during this period.

The paper will ask whether this period of Vergilian/American ascendency has drawn to a close along with the Cold War, and is being replaced by an aetas Ovidiana that is better adapted to a "new world order" that is characterized not by a binary opposition between two superpowers, but by an uncertain relationship between the one remaining superpower and the rest of the world, where power is diffused among a multitude of resurgent and emergent regional  powers around the globe. This theme will be explared further at a subsequent conference that will be held in Dublin a about a year's time.