Introductory description

The module, which will take the form of a weekly seminar, has three principal aims: 1) to provide specialist training in the research methods and tools available to classicists working on ancient texts (including dictionaries, reference works, online resources); 2) to explore and analyse a range of methodologies and approaches used in the study of ancient texts in their cultural and political contexts; and 3) to train students to develop extended scholarly arguments, and to present their work orally to a professional standard. Students will be able to significantly enhance the knowledge and skills acquired at undergraduate level, and to develop the expertise required for doctoral research in Classics, in a supportive and stimulating environment. The module will run in the first term of the course, and will be followed in term 2 by the optional core modules ‘Roman Literature and Thought’ and ‘Greek Literature and Thought’, which will further develop, apply and put into practice the techniques and methodologies studied here.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

This module, which will take the form of a weekly seminar, will explore a range of methodologies and approaches used in the study of ancient texts in their cultural and political contexts. The module also aims to provide specialist training in conducting research at postgraduate level, including training in research resources and tools and in presentational skills, thus allowing students to develop the expertise required to continue to doctoral study. Students will be able to significantly enhance the knowledge and skills acquired at undergraduate level, and to develop their own ideas and projects, in a supportive and stimulating environment. The first four, two-hour seminar sessions of the term will be dedicated to research methods, techniques, tools and resources, and to skills in written and oral presentation of research, and will involve workshops and group discussion. In the remaining sessions, which will require specific reading and preparation, we will investigate a particular theme, idea, debate or theory that informs or has shaped an area of modern classical scholarship of ancient texts. Examples include ‘intertextuality and the dialogic’; ‘historicisms old and new’; ‘the unconscious’; ‘paratext’; ‘phonocentrism’; ‘exemplarity’; ‘post-colonialisms’; ‘the law’; ‘ideology’; ‘redemption’; ‘performativity’; ‘absence’. Students will be asked to give regular short presentations throughout the term.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• make full use of all the research tools and resources available to classicists working on ancient texts.
• articulate a detailed, interdisciplinary understanding of a range of methodologies and approaches to the study of ancient texts within their historical, cultural and political contexts.
• show knowledge of, and ability to analyse, a wide range of contemporary scholarship on ancient texts.
• articulate a nuanced understanding of how critical theory has been used and interpreted by classicists from the early 20th century to the present.
• use the skills and expertise they have acquired to produce professionally laid out papers, develop extended scholarly arguments, and give confident, well-organised and fluent presentations.

Indicative reading list

Eagleton, T. (2003) After Theory. London.
Butler, S. (2015) The Ancient Phonograph. New York.
Butler, S ed. (2016) Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, London.
Bloom, H. (1979), ‘The Breaking of Form’, in H. Bloom, P. De Man, J. Derrida, G. H. Hartman,
and J. H. Miller eds., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York), 1–37.
Culler, J. (2015), Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA.
Derda, T., J. Hilder and J.Kwapisz, eds.,(2017) Fragments, Holes, and Wholes: Reconstructing the
Ancient World in Theory and Practice, Warsaw.
Fearn, D. (2017) Pindar’s Eyes. Oxford.
Feldherr, A. (1998) Spectacle and Society in Livy's History. Berkeley, LA.
Fowler, D.P. (2000) Roman Constructions. Readings in Postmodern Latin. Oxford.
Fitzgerald, W. (2000) Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. Cambridge.
Gibson, R.K., and C.S.Kraus, eds. (2002). The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices,
Theory. Leiden.
Goldhill, S. (2009) The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, Cambridge.
Grafton, A., G.W. Most, and S.Settis, eds. (2010) The classical tradition. Cambridge, MA.
Gunderson, Erik (2000) Staging Masculinity. The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World. Ann Arbor.
Habinek, T. (1998) The Politics of Latin Literature. Princeton.
Halliwell, S. (2011), Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus. Oxford.
Harpham, G. (2009) ‘Roots, races, and the return to philology’. Representations 106:34–63.
Harrison, S. ed. (2001) Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature. Oxford.
Hinds, S. (1998) Allusion and Intertext. Cambridge.
Holmes. B. (2012) Gender: Antiquity and its legacy. Oxford.,
Janan, M. (2009) Reflections in a Serpent’s Eye. Thebes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Oxford.
Lowrie, M.(2009) Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome. Oxford.
________(2015) “Poetics and Theory: A Graduate Certificate Program at New York University,” in Literary Theory in Graduate and Undergraduate Classics Curricula, Nigel Nicholson (ed.), Classical World, Paedagogus section, 108.2 (2015) 255-68.
Martindale, C. (1993) Redeeming the Text. Cambridge.
McAuley, M. (2016) Reproducing Rome. Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca and Statius. Oxford.
Oliensis, E. (2009) Freud’s Rome. Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry. Cambridge.
Payne, M. (2010) The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination. Chicago.
(2016) 2016. “Aetna and Aetnaism: Schiller, vibrant matter, and the phenomenal regimes of ancient poetry.” Helios 43: 1-20.
Rimell, V. (2015) The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics. Cambridge.
Stephens, S.A., and P.Vasunia, eds. (2010) Classics and National Cultures. Oxford.
Stray, Christopher, ed. 2010. Classical dictionaries: Past, Present and Future. London.

Subject specific skills

By the end of this module students should expect to have:

• acquired advanced knowledge of, and ability to use, the latest research resources and tools available to classicists;
• acquired a detailed, interdisciplinary understanding of a range of methodologies and approaches to the study of ancient texts within their historical, cultural and political contexts;
• acquired a detailed knowledge of, and ability to analyse, a wide range of contemporary scholarship on ancient texts;
• developed a nuanced understanding of how critical theory has been used and interpreted by classicists from the early 20th century to the present;
• developed into autonomous researchers with the skills and expertise required to produce professionally laid-out papers, develop extended scholarly arguments, and to give confident, well-organised and fluent presentations.

Transferable skills

• critical thinking
• problem solving
• active lifelong learning
• communication
• information literacy
• professionalism