Debbie Salt

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias The widespread present presentism (😅) is outrageous! and when you treat students like adults, they can really get a text, even if it is -- gasp -- ancient.

@debbie_nacl @mattyglesias Coming from theater, I'm just so exhausted of directors feeling like they have to "solve" or "outsmart" older plays and playwrights for contemporary audiences. 🙄

The impulse to diversify canonical works like The Odyssey is the whole concept of a canon doing what it’s supposed to do — serving as broad cultural patrimony rather than as a curious foreign story. slowboring.com/p/a-diverse-od…

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias Very much agree about our exchanges! Also, I fear I may be adding to the bad side of discourse in a piece coming soon in CRJ, for all my sins... ah well, what can you do? ;)

@debbie_nacl @mattyglesias Oh yeah, for only having "met" each other a couple days ago, I've enjoyed our exchanges! And I feel similarly. At best reception/reader response can help bring in audiences new to the material. At worst... well, I'm sure we can both think of plenty of examples. 😂

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias My gut feeling, though, is when my students relate, say, Catullus to Taylor Swift…do I think it’s a “real” connection? Literarily, no. But if it helps them approximate an affective response? Into it. It’s impossible to historicize affect, and that’s the core of poetry.

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias Yeah, I think we might be reasonably (I hope!) disagreeing. I know what you mean, but I also think it must be in Aristophanes to some degree for it even to be understood as, say, feminist by a modern audience. Reader response etc.

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias Oh, and I only meant students with extremely little sociopolitical context of 5th century Athens. The relatability of the classical tradition (what I’d call western civ) is either due to ahistoricism (reception?) or humanity (great books?). I don’t really see a difference

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias I’m very much into the canon and think it’s good. But engaging with it per force means reimagining in our own terms. Historicism only gets us so far. Genuinely unsure if we’re agreeing or not bc I don’t know what you mean by increments or smudging lines.

@JasonColavito Thank you!

@debbie_nacl Sure. Natalis Comes (Mythologiae 6.8) misread the word δολόμηδες in the scholia to Apollonius of Rhodes at 3.26 as a proper name, and it was then misprinted in a later edition of Comes as "Diomedes," and scholars repeated that Jason's "real" name was "Diomedes" for 500 years.

To be fair, while AI has made the problem so much worse, scholars copying references from one another without checking the original has been an ongoing problem. In one case, I found an incorrect reference to a Greek scholion had been repeated among scholars for 500 years!

@grace_hawthorn @JasonColavito I mean, Joan Smith isn’t doing what OP is suggesting. She’s talking about the misogyny in ancient sources, repeated uncritically by scholars for a long time. But since the 70s feminism has forced classics reckon with misogyny.

@JasonColavito have you read Joan Smith's "Unfortunately She Was a Nymphomaniac"? it's a masterclass in going back to the original source & revealing what got lost in the lazy citations for 2000 years

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias Intro Greek tragedy*

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias I don’t think Yglesias knows about it, to be clear, but intellectually that’s what he’s getting at? Seeing yourself in antiquity IS what western civ is premised on. And literally no one goes into Greek tragedy seeing themselves as a historically accurate Antigone.

@PlaidBarbarian @mattyglesias I think reception theory disagrees with you here.

@mattyglesias Concerns of the canon: authenticity, officiality, rules, principles, standards. NOT concerns of the canon: the impulse to diversify.

What I have learned from this new bit of citation discourse is that gender studies underwater basket weaving programs have more rigorous academic standards than the entirety of STEM.

@Suflaky Didn’t you read the paper? And see the correct bibliographic info on the first page? I’m confused.

Getting citations right: (1) There’s no central repository of bibliographic data. Google Scholar is terrible, I used it in my first ever paper, and got an angry email from a Professor. Apparently the GS record scanned the front page of his paper and added the editors in,

To settle a troublesome discourse, I have provided here the most faithful and poetic possible translation of the beginning of the Odyssey. We male sex. We complex. We fake horse. We off course. We sail long. We hear song. We pig crew. We home soon.

@AntigoneJournal @getty_a96716 @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour Surely you’d agree a degree in classics, at any point, indicates an interest in the ancient world? I’m not sure I follow your second point. Are you saying that classicists are too equivocal?

@debbie_nacl @getty_a96716 @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour Not indicative of anything particular: limited in meaning anything one would trust taking a firm hold on.

It’s rather heart-warming to see how the broad onslaught of stupidity has united the few real Classicists left on this website, in spite of political and other differences.

@AntigoneJournal @getty_a96716 @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour Meant little in what sense?

Degree credentials in Classics have meant little since the late 90s - not because those who hold them cannot be brilliant but because there has been no secure mechanism to mark out those who in fact know little and have nothing to contribute. In many ways this parallels the age of Bentley and Porson when lots or people attained degrees despite being far behind the curve, but among such people were titanic scholars. More importantly, however, most higher degrees then had no strong diagnostic value. No-one would have claimed a Masters to have any particular intellectual standing in pre-1830s England. What mattered was what you said and did. Naturally this required an education but that was to be proved by exercising it. The dynamics were in practice the opposite of credentialism: as Bentley had it, "No man was ever written out of reputation but by himself."

@getty_a96716 @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour @AntigoneJournal I can only refer to Socrates hard won wisdom: 🤷‍♂️

@debbie_nacl @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour @AntigoneJournal Eh, I think in terms of population ratio the current environment on X is far, far more inclined to anti-intellectualism , bigotry and sheer stupidity than Athens was on average.

@getty_a96716 @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour @AntigoneJournal I completely get your point, but, by that metric, late 5th century Athens wasn’t Socratic. I *think* I know what a chud is, and Plato def makes Meletus and Anytus look like chuds

@debbie_nacl @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash @ArmandDAngour @AntigoneJournal Socratic only works when in a Socratic environment. When you start it in an environment filled with chuds, I’m going to assume you’re a hostile interlocutor and refuse to engage further because all questions will be assumed of ill intent.

@getty_a96716 @PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash At Oxbridge, undergrads are called Classicists (and hellenists or Latinists). I remember finding this weird as it seemed aspirational. But I think OP is just getting your goat. Maybe what Theo meant by “real” is care about antiquity more frequently than when Nolan releases a film

@PhiloCrocodile @theo_nash Your argumentation leads straight to “the professors can now be wholly replaced by AI”.