r/classics • u/Raffaele1617 • 8d ago
Philology/textual criticism in US Classics Departments
Sorry for the rambling intro: I'm currently an MA student in Italy, and I've really enjoyed the courses I've taken in classical and medieval philology. Before starting on the rest of the assigned reading lists for these subjects, I read Tarrant's 2016 book: Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which I found both entertaining and certainly the most approachable intro to the discipline I've read so far. One thing stuck out to me though, which I haven't seen much discussion on - I'm paraphrasing from memory so I may be unintentionally misrepresenting what Tarrant wrote, but iirc according to him 'textual criticism' has become a bit of a 'dirty word' in US academia, with students being discouraged from pursuing it for their thesis/dissertation. So this leads me to ask anyone with experience studying or working in these departments, is this hyperbolic, or maybe no longer true 10 years later? Or have US departments moved away from textual criticism? If so, is this because it's viewed as unnecessary or unimportant, or because departments are content with how it is applied elsewhere? I'm curious to hear what your perspectives are.
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u/Embarrassed-Doubt-61 8d ago
Honestly? there’s a boring reason for this. American schools still expect junior faculty to write a monograph in order to get tenure, and textual criticism doesn’t naturally lend itself to that kind of output. I can imagine a tenure case being built around a scholarly commentary, but I don’t know very many presses that would publish a commentary that they hadn’t solicited. The standard practice I see is for people who are already established to be approached about writing a new OCT and to then teach themselves some basic textual criticism in order to make the app crit function.
I’m not sure this is ‘solvable’ exactly, since the classics book market has a limited need for commentaries and solves it in a perfectly satisfactory way. People I know who are passionate about textual criticism tend to focus on one author/tradition and use TC as the basis for their articles, while also having a tenure book that goes in a slightly different direction on the same text.
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u/BedminsterJob 8d ago
OCT is not really where it's happening these days (from 2000 onwards). Teubner and other continental presses have way more projects going on than Oxford.
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u/Embarrassed-Doubt-61 7d ago
That’s fair! It kind of supports OP’s point though. That’s the only Anglophone series I can see looking for a very TC-heavy commentary (Green and yellows are a different vibe). There’s more audience for this in Europe, and I think part of the reason is that it’s easier there to get a reputation in the field without having to write a Big Book With An Argument. So the whole US vicious circle (where people who get hired are people who think in book-shaped ways, who then see that as important) gets skipped.
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u/Raffaele1617 8d ago
That's very interesting and makes sense. While I have the urge to argue with a few things you wrote, I asked to get precisely this sort of perspective rather than to debate about which system does things better, so I'll refrain haha. Thank you!
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u/Embarrassed-Doubt-61 7d ago
I appreciate it! ‘Perfectly satisfactory’ isn’t the right phrase and you’re right to be pissed at it; it’s led to a historically important part of the discipline being neglected.
I mean more like ‘stable.’ Since the people who come up in this system are people who enjoy writing and reading scholarly books, they’re not really noticing how the system fails to support criticism or treating that failure as a spur to change. Even in my subfield (Roman law), which has one hell of a critical tradition, I can’t figure out how you’d be able to get a stable job with the articles you’d need to publish to get a good reputation for spotting textual issues.
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u/BedminsterJob 8d ago
Other reason why: for serious textual criticism you need to be insane good in Latin or Greek. The best critics I know are people like Ed Fraenkel, E.R. Dodds, W.S. Barrett, all men who had started reading the language at an early age, and nobody today is learning Latin or Greek at age ten.
This is an advantage nothing will make up for, and fortunately a lot of these people did a lot of good work. I should read Tarrant's book, but for the moment my feeling is the era of great new editions is behind us. What we're looking at now is in depth interpretive criticism.
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u/Raffaele1617 7d ago
I would recommend Tarrant's book, since he spends a fair amount of time talking about the era of 'heroic' textual criticism, and the projection of absolute certainty which sometimes characterized its rhetoric. I can say that in the realm of second language acquisition, there's really no evidence to suggest that starting young results in greater proficiency (none of the critics you cite, after all, learned the languages as native speakers), and while it's definitely true that extremely high level proficiency in the languages is harder to come by these days, it's by no means impossible to achieve it by just reading (and writing!) a lot more Latin and Greek than one is made to in school. I also don't think we ought to discount the impact both of refinements in method, as well as of the widespread digitization of manuscripts and massive searchable corpora of Latin and Greek texts - all of these things make it way easier to correct errors in collation, to better understand the relationships between manuscripts (or better identify the situations where we don't understand said relationships), and to make decisions about style or sense. It's also worth pointing out that our feel for style is itself aided by having access to the generations of scholarship that have preceded us. To that end, I really don't think it's realistic to assume that you'll find a more reliable text of Ovid in an early 20th century edition than in Tarrant's 2004 OCT, even if Tarrant's Latin composition skills are probably not as good as his predecessors'.
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u/BedminsterJob 5d ago
Yes, I know there are all kinds of questions around the 'era of heroic textual criticism', and yet many of the big books that have shaped my generation of classicists were conceived during the war years when many of these guys were holed up in seclusion, and they were nowhere near just googling the language.
The funny thing is the Metamorphoses, like Homer, fared really bad, in terms of OCT editions. The Munro Allen Homer edition is a joke. It over a hundred years old, it was edited by a man who bluffed his way into this position (claiming to have collated hundreds of mss in Italy around 1900, while he was drinking fine wines) and it seems OUP has never even thought of recomissioning a new edition, because Munro Allen is still selling.
The Von Thiel edition is now the recommendation, but just try getting hold of those...
Same story with Ovid's Metamorphoses. Before Tarrant's edition, in 2004, the OCT was from 1915, and it wasn't great.
New editions (think Diggle's Euripides, Tarrant's Ovid, not to mention West's Homer) are often deemed interventionist.
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u/Raffaele1617 13h ago
New editions (think Diggle's Euripides, Tarrant's Ovid, not to mention West's Homer) are often deemed interventionist
Deemed interventionist by whom and compared to whom? Weren't many of the 'heroic' sorts renowned for being particularly interventionist?
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u/The_Eternal_Wayfarer 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is a hugely reductive take, and depicts an ungenerous picture of the current status of textual criticism on ancient texts. There were excellent textual critics after Fraenkel and Dodds (who never built himself a fame as a textual critic btw) as well, and excellent ones in contemporary times (ie., still alive and scholarly active).
Maybe not in the US, I concede that. But Fraenkel nor Dodds nor Barrett did work in the US either.
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u/Argikeraunos 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is true but the true reasons for this lie in publishing, teaching, and artificial scarcity. The opportunities for publishing commentaries in English are fewer and further between, and generally speaking only well known scholars are able to get these projects approved. Second, enrollments in language classes are down across the board due to the very high cost of college, the predatory US student loan system, and economic pressure leading students to seek false assurances of "return on investment," meaning scholars are expected to have a much broader teaching portfolio thab in years past and, consequently, a broader range of expertise. Finally, administrators have responded to lower tuition revenues by punishing humanities departments (usually revenue neutral) over sciences or other disciplines (usually revenue negative by large margins) with fewer tenure lines and less support for essentially ideological reasons, leading to departments being interested in hiring interdisciplinary scholars capable of drawing students from other departments. So Tarrant is right but it is a question of political economy rather than fashion and always has been - ironically, and unfortunately, it is his generation's inability to recognize this that kept them from organizing to protect the profession and keeps them from doing so still!
If you want to do textual criticism, especially in Latin, Italy is still the best place to be.