Tradition vs.

Reception as Models for

Studying the Great Books

Michael Broder

ABSTRACT: Great Books core curriculum courses play a role in de-

fining the relationship between past and present for undergraduate
students. Two competing approaches to constructing this relationship
are described, namely classical tradition and classical reception. The
classical tradition model is based on the idea of Greco-Roman influ-
ence on Western civilization. The classical reception model is based
on a process of reappropriation and redefinition to assert or chal-
lenge continuity with a privileged past. Examples including Vergils
Aeneid, Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice, and Anne Carsons
Autobiography of Red demonstrate how teachers can implement a
classical reception approach in the classical civilization classroom.

My experience of Great Books core curriculum courses spans many years, first as
a student at Columbia University and later as a teacher at York College, Queens
College, and Brooklyn College, all in the City University of New York (CUNY)
system, and at the University of South Carolina (Columbia).1 In this essay, I
focus on the role such courses play in defining, for undergraduate students, the
relationship between past and present. I will describe two competing approach-
es to constructing this relationship, namely classical tradition and classical re-
ception. In the classical tradition model, Greco-Roman antiquity provides the
foundation for, and influences the development of, modern Europe and Western
civilization. According to the classical reception model, individuals and societies
continually reappropriate and redefine classical antiquity in an effort to assert
(or, at times, to challenge) continuity with a privileged past. The classical tradi-
tion model is the one we grew up with; the classical reception model, I contend,
better prepares our students to think critically and participate actively as citizens
of democratic societies in a globalized, postcolonial, multicultural world. This
is because the classical tradition model tends to reproduce truisms about the
meaning of the past and its value to the present, while the classical reception
model encourages creative and independent thought about such urgent catego-
ries as democracy, freedom, and justice.

1
This essay began life as a presentation on a panel entitled Classics and the Great
Books, Judith P. Hallett and Alex Beam (The Boston Globe) presiding, Classical Associa-
tion of the Atlantic States Annual Meeting, Wilmington, Del., Oct. 10, 2009. It has ben-
efited greatly from editorial input by Dr. H. Christian Blood.

Classical World, vol. 106, no. 3 (2013) Pp. 505515.

506 Classical World

I. The Rise of Reception

The reception movement began with the work of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolf-
gang Iser at Germanys University of Constance in the 1960s.2 Jauss saw the
history of philology since the Renaissance as a progression of three major para-
digms: the classical-humanist paradigm; the historicist-positivist paradigm; and
the aesthetic-formalist paradigm. The scholars task according to the classical-
humanist paradigm, which prevailed from the Renaissance through the early
modern period, was to judge the literature of the present against the aesthetic
standards established by the ancients. The historicist-positivist paradigm took
over during the Enlightenment, when the tasks of scholarship became textual
criticism and source studies, establishing critical editions and tracing the his-
torical lineage of the modern national literatures. Finally, the aesthetic-formalist
paradigm emerged after World War I, comprising approaches such as Russian
Formalism, New Criticism, and others that emphasized the autonomy and in-
tegrity of the modern literary text. Reception, in a sense, constitutes a fourth
paradigm: Jauss response to his perception that the field of literary study, by the
1960s, had come to demand a new approach, one that continued to value the
literary text as autonomous object but also allowed for historical inquiry into the
conditions of textual production and consumption.
The program for reception studies outlined by Jauss locates the text in three
historical contexts: (1) that of the texts initial production; (2) the reception
of the text by communities of readers in diverse times and places; and (3) the
social function of the text, which could include an exploration of the values and
meanings of the text for readers at the time of the texts production or during
any subsequent period of the texts reception, including for todays reader. As
I hope to demonstrate with a series of case studies at the end of this essay, a
classical reception approach may be a useful alternative to the classical tradition
approach in todays Great Books core curriculum classroom. First, however, let
us consider the history and limitations of the classical tradition model.

2
See W. Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from
Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore 1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Re-
sponse (Baltimore 1978); H. R. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics,
Michael Shaw, tr. (Minneapolis 1982) and Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Timothy
Bahti, tr. (Minneapolis 1982). For a concise and accessible overview, see R. C. Holub,
Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (Madison 1984). For additional background
on reception theory and its connections with other postmodern critical approaches, see T.
Eagleton, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Reception Theory, in Literary Theory: An
Introduction (Minneapolis 1996) 4778, and R. C. Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception
Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison 1992). For a focused discussion of
reception studies in classics, see C. Martindale, Reception, in C. Kallendorf, ed., A Com-
panion to the Classical Tradition (Malden, Mass., 2007). For examples of reception theory
applied to classical studies, see the essays in both C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas, eds.,
Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford 2006) and L. Hardwick and C. Stray, eds., A
Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, Mass., 2008).
 Paedagogus 507

II. The Classical Tradition Model

The notion of classical tradition that informs most Great Books programs com-
bines Jauss classical-humanist and historicist-positivist paradigms by seeking
the source of Western literature and culture in a classical canon valued as time-
less, exemplary, and universally true. One of its clearest exemplars is Gilbert
Highets 1949 volume, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences
on Western Literature.3 Highets text is heavily laden throughout with Anglo-
Eurocentric values and assumptions. For example, Highet begins his chapter
on the early Renaissance writers Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Cervantes as follows:

The Dark Ages were the victory of barbarism over classical civilization.
The Middle Ages were the epoch during which, having been converted, the
barbarians slowly civilized themselves with the help of the church and of the
surviving fragments of classical culture. The Renaissance meant the enlargement
of that growing civilization and its enrichment by many material and spiritual
benefits, some acquired for the first time, others rediscovered after a long and
almost death-like sleep.4

Highet here describes Western Europe as the site of an epochal battle between
classical civilization and barbarism. He uses the word civilization or civi-
lized three times in these seventy-four words, and associates civilization per se
with the Catholic Church and classical culture, by which he means the pre-
Christian, pagan culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Highet describes this clas-
sical culture as surviving in fragments, and he represents civilization as the
process of gathering up and reassembling these fragments like the shards of a
broken vessel. Thus, Highet not only endows the Renaissance with subjective
agency, he represents it in organic terms, with civilization as its virtually con-
scious life-force, which awakens from the death-like sleep of barbarism and
then grows and enriches itself via its assimilation of classical culture.5
The Highet passage cited above echoes the organic metaphor found in
Joachim du Bellays 1549 Dfense et illustration de la langue franaise.6 In this
influential statement of Renaissance literary theory, du Bellay explains how the
Romans enriched their own language not by direct translation of Greek classics,
but rather by imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into
them, devouring them, and after having well digested them, converting them

3
G. Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Lit-
erature (New York and London, 1949). For another example of a similar approach, see R.
R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge 1954).
4
Highet (above, n.3) 81.
5
P. Bovie, Highet and the Classical Tradition, Arion 6 (1967) 98115, offers an
interesting take on Highet, his teaching, and his scholarship.
6
J. Du Bellay, R. Helgerson, ed. and tr., The Regrets, with The Antiquities of Rome,
Three Latin Elegies, and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language (Philadel-
phia 2006).
508 Classical World

into blood and nourishment.7 But where du Bellay gestures toward the produc-
tion of an authentically French literature, Highet argues for the reproduction of
classical civilization within modern Anglo-European society, as suggested by the
very first sentence of his introduction: Our modern world is in many ways a
continuation of the world of Greece and Rome.8
Du Bellays production of French literature and Highets reproduction of
classical civilization are both, in fact, formations of classical reception. Highets
approach to classical antiquity, however, is remarkable for its mythic privileging
of continuity and tradition that represents itself not as a subjective act of valua-
tion, but rather as an objectively true historical relationship between Greco-Ro-
man antiquity and Anglo-European modernity, between past and present. That
is, where du Bellay is making a transparent choice to value classical civilization
as the basis for French culture, Highet is making an opaque argument about
the seamless continuity between classical past and Western present. Highets
rhetoric may best be understood in the context of the nineteenth-century rise of
the modern research university, with its diversity of disciplines that replaced the
traditional higher-education curriculum based on classical studies, as well as in
the context of the democratization of higher education, a process that brought
increasing numbers of working-class men and women into the academy and
threatened to undermine the cultural homogeneity that had prevailed as long as
higher education was an essentially aristocratic phenomenon.9 This democratiz-
ing trend, I would argue, is an important provocation for the development of
the Great Books programs after the First World War at Columbia University,
the University of Chicago, and St. Johns College. This trend continued with the
passage of the Servicemens Readjustment Act, popularly known as the G. I. Bill,
signed into law by President Roosevelt in June 1944. In a very real sense, Highets
The Classical Tradition serves as a rationale and study guide for the Great Books
courses that emerged at major American universities between the wars.

7
Imitant les meilleurs auteurs grecs, se transformant en eux, les dvorant, et aprs
les avoir bien digrs, les convertissant en sang et nourriture. Du Bellays essay is often
considered to be a manifesto of the so-called Pliade of French poets that revolved around
du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, and Jean-Antoine de Baf. For a concise overview of the
movement, see the introduction in du Bellay (above, n.6). We hear echoes of du Bellays
conception of poetic practice in T. S. Eliots 1919 essay, Tradition and the Individual Tal-
ent, and in Harold Blooms tetralogy on poetic misprision published in the 1970s. Even
in du Bellays time, a debate raged between his reception-oriented approach and a more
tradition-oriented approach to classicism, such as that of French jurist and grammarian
Thomas Sbillet (15121589), who argued in his 1548 Art Potique that French poetry
was part of a continuum that began with the Greeks and Romans.
8
Highet (above, n.3) 1.
9
See G. Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago 1987), esp.
the introduction, The Humanist Myth, Part I, Literature in the Old College: 1828
1876, and Part II, The Early Professional Era: 18751915. Graff 121174 includes
discussion of the Great Books programs developed in the period between the two world
wars by John Erskine at Columbia University, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the
University of Chicago, and Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan at St. Johns College.
 Paedagogus 509

In a 1965 article on The Classical Tradition in America that appeared in

Classical World, John F. Latimer succinctly summarizes the impetus for classical
traditionalism:

Western civilization, as every schoolboy used to know, has its roots in Greece
and Rome. The stream of democracy has its source in Athens. Rome is the
originator of the republican form of government with its system of law and
justice. All of the forms of literature (except satire, which is Roman), and all
grammatical terms, have come down from Greece by way of Rome. Over sixty
percent of our English vocabulary derives directly or indirectly via the Romance
tongues from Greek and Latin. In philosophy, architecture, sculpture, and art,
the ancient masters are still perennial sources of inspiration and precept.10

The most telling part of this passage is the parenthetical phrase, as every school-
boy used to know, in the very first sentence, because it expresses the profound
and persistent anxiety among classical traditionalists about the erosion of the
classical tradition in American society. Latimer echoes the organic metaphor
(Greek authors as food source for French poets) that we saw in du Bellays
classic treatise when he argues that the American classical tradition needs con-
tinual renewal at its perennial sources.11 Like Highet, Latimer represents the
classical tradition as a virtually sentient life force when he cites film, theater, and
television as evidence for the vitality of the classical spirit.12 While Latimer
writes in defense of the classical tradition, what his essay ultimately argues for is
the inevitability of classical reception in any society that valorizes Greco-Roman
antiquity, as ours most certainly does. Film, theater, and television, to which
we could add music, the visual arts, poetry, fiction, comics, and graphic novels,
translations of classical texts, the practices of archaeology and art historyall
constitute formations of classical reception.

III. Beyond the Limits of Classical Tradition

In March 2009, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the triennial

faculty survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA,
and the article inspired a flurry of responses from classicists on the online Clas-
sics Discussion List.13 The article, entitled Social Change Tops Classic Books

10
J. F. Latimer, The Classical Tradition in America. CW 58 (1965) 129.
11
Latimer (above, n.10) 131.
12
Latimer (above, n.10) 131.
13
For the Chronicle article, see R. Wilson, Social Change Tops Classic Books in
Professors Teaching Priorities, The Chronicle of Higher Education Online. Mar. 5, 2009
(available at http://chronicle.com/article/Social-Change-Tops-Classic/1564). For the sur-
vey itself, see L. DeAngelo, S. Hurtado, J. H. Pryor, K. R. Kelly, and J. L. Santos, The
American College Teacher: National Norms for the 20072008 HERI Faculty Survey (Los
Angeles 2009). For information about the Classics Discussion List, including how to join
the list and access the archives, visit http://classics-l.info/.
510 Classical World

in Professors Teaching Priorities, focused on the finding that the proportion

of college professors who said it was important to encourage undergraduates to
become agents of social change was substantially greater than the proportion
who said it was important to teach classical texts, what we are referring to here
as Great Books. Classicists who participated in the online dialogue lamented the
erosion of commitment to classic texts documented by the survey. Typically, clas-
sicists argued that classical texts are completely relevant to contemporary social
issues. As true as that may be, that is not the issue to which the survey pointed.
Rather, the survey told us something about how professors in the humanities
and the social sciences, particularly younger professors, understood their peda-
gogical mission. Based on their understanding of what the term classic texts
denoted, which could include anything from Homer to Shakespeare to Dos-
toyevsky to Marx, Freud, and Einstein, teaching such texts was less important
than developing critical thinking skills and equipping their students to become
agents of social change (a term the survey left undefined).
I would argue that my colleagues in classics, rather than lamenting the ero-
sion of commitment to classical texts on the part of an increasing proportion
of humanists and social scientists in todays academy, need to acknowledge the
disconnect and develop strategies to address it.14 One strategy might be a shift
from a classical tradition approach to a classical reception approach to teaching
so-called Great Books. There are several reasons why I think such a shift could
be helpful. As I suggested earlier, the classical tradition model tends to assume
a seamless continuity between classical antiquity and the modern West. Such
continuity may not seem consistent with the idea of social change, as many of
todays professors understand it. But as I noted at the outset, a reception ap-
proach allows us to study and teach any text, even a classical text, in terms
of its diversity of meanings and values for communities of readers in different
historical contexts, from antiquity throughout the centuries and up to the pres-
ent day. Such an approach might be more consistent with current ideas about
social change, and with the pedagogical value of encouraging undergraduates to
become agents of such change. Indeed, a classical reception approach allows us
to shift our narrative of classical antiquity from one of eternal verities continu-
ally reproduced, to one of enduring objects that continue to speak to different
readers in successive generations and centuries in new and newly valuable ways.

IV. Classroom Examples

Three examples may clarify how one could take a classical reception approach in
the kind of classical civilization course that any one of us might teach.
First, an undergraduate classroom unit on the Aeneid might consider Vergil
as a poet engaged in the process of classical reception. The classical tradition
model typically focuses on the Aeneid as a testimony to the Roman national

14
See M. Broder, Classicists Must Challenge Conservative Biases, The Chronicle
of Higher Education 55 (2009) A32.
 Paedagogus 511

character and especially to the values of manly virtue (virtus), respect for the
gods (pietas), dutiful loyalty (fides), and the characteristically Augustan modera-
tion (clementia) on which the pax Romana was supposed to have been found-
ed.15 Remember that Great Books programs were established in the wake of the
First World War to help shore up adherence to small-d democratic and small-r
republican values among the increasingly diverse undergraduate population.16
In such a context, emphasizing the Aeneids transmission of such values makes
some degree of sense. In todays classroom, however, where our students in-
creasingly hail not only from a variety of socioeconomic groups but from a range
of postcolonial cultures with complex relationships to the British imperialism
of the nineteenth century or the American hegemony of the twentieth, such an
approach may make less sense.
In my classroom, I typically ask my students to consider what Vergil is doing
with his epic predecessors: How is Vergil using the conventions of epic poetry
and the narratives of classical mythology to create a foundation myth for the
Roman Principate? Perhaps more important, why does Vergil turn to epic and
mythological antecedents to narrate the destiny of Rome? I do not think this ap-
proach will strike any of you as particularly radical, nor am I claiming that it is;17
I would argue, however, that such an approach addresses issues of individual
agency in the process of social change much more than the kind of approach
that focuses on the Aeneid as a timeless repository of transcendent moral values.
Instead of taking away the message that the ancient Romans valued bravery in
battle, respect for the gods, and obligation to duty, and you should, too, students
learn to question the process of national mythmaking itself. This inquiry could
take a virtually endless number of directions, depending on the interests of the
teacher and the students. For example, the teacher might shift the classroom
discussion from the myth of Romes heroic beginnings to myths about American
heroes past and present, historical and fictional, from the Founding Fathers to
counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on the television series 24. Whose social,
political, and economic interests are served by a particular national myth? How
free are we to accept, reject, modify, or reinterpret the national myths we grow
up with? The teacher could enrich this discussion further with additional tex-
tual examples, both ancient and modern. For example, the teacher might hand
out Horaces Odes III.2.13 alongside British poet Wilfred Owens 1917 poem
Dulce Et Decorum Est, which explicitly challenges the heroic value system cel-

15
See, for example, J. W. Mackail, Virgil and His Meaning To The World of Today
(New York 1963, orig. pub. 1900).
16
For a discussion of the impact of World War I on educational values in America
generally and Great Books programs in particular, see Graff (above, n.9) 12832.
17
Some version of this approach is taken, for example, in B. Otis, The Odyssean
Aeneid and the Iliadic Aeneid, in S. Commager, Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966); A. Clausen, Virgils Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic
Poetry (Berkeley 1987); C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Herme-
neutics of Reception (Cambridge 1993); and S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics
of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 1998).
512 Classical World

ebrated by Horace and Vergil by describing in gory detail the death of a comrade
in arms during a mustard gas attack.
As a second example, consider how an undergraduate classical civilization
syllabus might incorporate any of the plays of Shakespeare that constitute acts
of classical reception. In some plays, the connection with classical antiquity may
seem tangential. For example, we encounter a version of Theseus in A Midsum-
mer Nights Dream; the spirits in The Tempest are named Isis, Ceres, and Juno;
and King Lear is said to be a descendant of Aeneas, as is Cymbeline. In other
plays, the connection is more fully realized. The Comedy of Errors is an adap-
tation of Plautuss Menaechmi; Troilus and Cressida borrows characters from
Homers Iliad; and Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and
Cleopatra have Greek and Roman history as their subject matter. A classical tra-
ditionalist might look for traces of classical dramatic structure or classical mo-
rality in Shakespeares plays. But again, as with my previous example, a classical
reception approach would ask how and why Shakespeare appropriates narrative
material or dramatic conventions from classical antiquity to produce dramatic
works that have meaning and value in their own Elizabethan context.18
For example, in The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo and Jessica trade a series
of Ovidian allusions (5.1.130):

lorenzo
The moon shines bright: in such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls
And sighd his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.

jessica
In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully oertrip the dew
And saw the lions shadow ere himself
And ran dismayd away.

lorenzo
In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

For recent bibliography on Shakespeares reception of classical antiquity, see C.

18

Martindale and M. Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory

Essay (London and New York, 1990); W. Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist
Tradition (Cambridge 1990); J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford 1994); A. B. Taylor,
Shakespeares Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge 2000); and
C. Martindale and A. B. Taylor, Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge, New York, and
Melbourne, 2004).
 Paedagogus 513

jessica
In such a night
Medea gatherd the enchanted herbs
That did renew old son.

lorenzo
In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.

jessica
In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith
And neer a true one.

lorenzo
In such a night
Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrew,
Slander her love, and he forgave it her.

jessica
I would out-night you, did no body come;
But, hark, I hear the footing of a man.

At this point, the entrance of Stephano interrupts the lovers colloquy. Colin
Burrow has argued that this exchange between Lorenzo and Jessica is in itself an
act of classical reception, in which the lovers negotiate their anger and jealousy
through a competition in classical learning; the rhetorical display of classical
knowledge becomes part of the texture of conversation.19 Here again, we see
an emphasis on individual agency in the process of classical reception that can
get students thinking about their own role in the process of social change. Lo-
renzo and Jessica are not a sandy shore that Ovidian mythology has washed over.
Rather, they are active participants in a culture of Renaissance humanism. As
with our Vergil example, this classical reception approach can take the class in
a number of directions. For example, the instructor might introduce the notion
of cultural capital articulated by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in which
cultural knowledge, including knowledge of classical antiquity, becomes not only
a symbol but also an instrument of power and prestige.20

19
C. Burrow, Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture (in Martindale and Taylor,
above, n.18) 24.
20
See P. Bourdieu, Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction, in J. Karabel
and A. H. Halsey, eds., Power and Ideology in Education (New York 1977) 487511;
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, R. Nice, tr. (Cambridge, Mass.,
1984); The Forms of Capital, in J. G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Re-
search for the Sociology of Education (New York 1986) 24158; P. Bourdieu and J.-C.
514 Classical World

For my third and final example, I turn to a contemporary text. Anne Car-
sons 1998 novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, is a retelling of the Geryon
myth refracted through Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Latin American
mythology, as well as through the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the art of Pab-
lo Picasso, and the theories of foundational twentieth-century thinkers such as
Freud and Einstein.21 When I teach this text in my own classical culture courses,
many students are mystified, a few are delighted, but virtually all are profoundly
struck by the mere fact of classical reception taking place in the here and now of
their own historical moment. This was not Vergil reinventing Homer, or Catullus
imitating Sappho, or Horace reappropriating Callimachus. Here my students en-
countered a still-living classics professor (and leading Canadian-American poet)
who makes Geryon an American schoolboy living on an island off the Atlantic
coast and engaged in a bittersweet love affair with a leather-jacketed ruffian
named Herakles who comes from a nearby town called Hades.
Reading Carsons poem is not easy, let alone teaching it. Carsons text as-
sumes a familiarity with its wide range of intertexts, from the fragments of Ste-
sichorus and Platos Phaedrus to Heideggers Being and Time and Picassos Les
Demoiselles dAvignon, to name only a few. For classicists, the most accessible
point of entry into the text is probably the character of Geryon. Carson gives us a
Geryon who suffers because he is physically different, emotionally sensitive, and
intellectually creative. This is not really as much of a departure from classical
sources as it might seem at first blush, if we think of Carsons Geryon in the tra-
dition of such ambivalent classical figures as the god Hephaestus or the heroes
Daedalus and Oedipus (or indeed of Theocrituss reinvention of Polyphemus as
a bucolic poet in Idyll 11, itself a striking act of classical reception). Carsons
novel allows the teacher to ask the students: Who are the monsters and who are
the heroes in our own time and place? What defines monstrosity or heroism?
Are the lines between the two really as clear as some ideological or rhetorical
traditions would suggest? Most important, perhaps, who gets to decide? Ulti-
mately, Carsons Geryon is a monster because he believes other people when
they tell him he is a monster. Through experience, as well as through studying
philosophy and practicing art, Geryon transforms and transcends his own mon-
strosity. Once again, as with our previous examples, we find ourselves in the
realm of individual agency and its role in the process of social change.

Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, R. Nice, tr. (London 1977);
and The Inheritors: French Students and their Relations to Culture (Chicago 1979).
21
A. Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (New York 1998). For a useful
analysis by a pioneering expert in classical reception, see E. Hall, The Autobiography of
the Western Subject: Carsons Geryon, in S. J. Harrison, ed., Living Classics: Greece and
Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (Oxford 2009) 21837. Other recent studies
include M. Tschofen, First I Must Tell about Seeing: (De)Monstrations of Visuality and
the Dynamics of Metaphor in Anne Carsons Autobiography of Red, Canadian Literature
180 (2004) 3152; and S. J. Murray, The Autobiographical Self: Phenomenology and
the Limits of Narrative Self-Possession in Anne Carsons Autobiography of Red, ESC 31
(2005) 10122.
 Paedagogus 515

V. Conclusion

In summary, my contention is that professional classicists must forgo the time-

honored notion of tradition in favor of the more controversial idea of reception
if we wish to keep our place at the Great Books table in undergraduate educa-
tion. For many of us, this wont be easy, because embracing a classical reception
model requires us to leave our geographical and chronological safety-zones and
become conversant with a fifteen-hundred-year post-classical history of classical
receptions. Its as if, after having chosen to study classics while our classmates
chose English, comparative literature, or cultural studies, we now must learn
their disciplines while remaining current with our own. But I would argue that
the rewards are well worth the risks.

Brooklyn, ny
mbroder@mbroder.com