Classical scholars are sometimes resistant to new approaches and retain a literalist bias, an unfortunate holdover from the positivism and scientism that sparked the necessary and important philological, historical, and textual achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Vive la résistance!
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, July 13, 2017
A Literalist Bias
Charles Segal, introduction to Cedric H. Whitman, The Heroic Paradox: Essays on Homer, Sophocles, and Aristophanes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 13: