Redeeming the Text: The Validity of Comparisons of Classical and Post-Classical Literature (A View from Britain)

What is Nachleben? A kind of German sau sage? So wrote, derisively, a former colleague from a different discipline, in response to a piece of work in which the word appeared. He had a point. Not everyone shares the classicist's love of pretentious terms of art. But the use of the word raises more issues than those of taste and professional mystique. What kind of Afterlife do its users have in mind? ? not, one may sus pect, a transcendent Platonic one, of a higher order of reality than life on earth: rather a ghostly, Homeric afterlife of insub stantial, gibbering shadows. The real life of a text, most classi cists assume, is the one it had in its original context; its subsequent is merely an entertaining hobby, or use ful material for a lightweight final chapter in a more weighty study. In this essay I shall attempt to defend the heuristic value of what can be termed cross-cultural comparisons of classical and postclassical literature, against the arguments of those who criticize such comparisons as ahistorical. Indeed, as we shall see, there is a sense in which the very notion of transculturalism can itself be usefully deconstructed. It will be argued that the relationship between ancient and literature is a dia lectical one, transcending conventional notions of influence. As a result, who can know of classics who only classics know? In defending this position I shall argue for ? or at any rate gesture toward ?a number of related propositions. One is that classi cists, in considering these matters, can learn from what is often, if perhaps rather misleadingly, called modern critical theory, and, in particular, that branch of it known as reception the