Tradition, Reception, and Popular Culture
Module 1 sets up two areas of focus that will be drawn on continuously throughout this course: firstly, methods of analyzing the many “receptions” of the Classical World in (High and) Popular Culture, and secondly, some of the principal ways in which the Classical World has actually been received in modern pre-digital popular culture (specifically, in film, comics and SciFi). Later Modules draw on both these areas of focus and extend them into digital popular culture. As noted in the Introductory lecture, one cannot focus only on “digital” receptions, because a grasp of both the ancient material and modern pre-digital receptions is essential to a fuller understanding of the reception of the Classical World in digital popular culture.
Module 1.1 initially outlines the long-standing association between the Classical World and “High” Culture, starting with the very meaning of the word “classicus,” which referred to the highest wealth level in the Roman regal period. Thus, class distinctions have been embedded from the beginning in the understanding and use of the term “classical,” especially when used to refer to the civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome. The congruence of the terms “Classical” and “High Culture” has been supported and exacerbated by the fact that elite education in the Western world was dominated for a very long time by “Classical Studies,” a discipline that tended, until the 1970s and 1980s, to propagate just this so-called “natural” association between high class and the “classical.”
The principal focus of this course, however, is the “reception” of the Classical World in digital “Popular” Culture. The meaning of the term “popular culture” is fraught with complications, and these complications are explored in the first section of Module 1, along with some of the ways in which Popular Culture is intertwined with post-Industrial Revolution capitalism and “mass” consumerism.
Module 1.2 examines the two major “ways of seeing” related to the “after-life” of Classical culture: “The Classical Tradition” and “Classical Reception Studies.” While The Classical Tradition “has in the past been used to focus on the transmission and dissemination of classical culture through the ages, usually with the emphasis on ‘influence’ or ‘legacy’” (Hardwick 2003, 2-3), and has tended to support the connections between the Classical World and High Culture, Classical Reception Studies examines “the ways in which Greek and Roman material has been transmitted, translated, excerpted, interpreted, rewritten, re-imaged and represented” (Hardwick and Stray 2011, 1). This course locates itself firmly within “Reception Studies.”
Module 1.3 then examines the kinds of classical phenomena or “objects” that have been the primary focus of modern pre-digital and digital receptions, various ways of classifying them, and asks whether, as the source material is stretched beyond recognition, there is a “breaking point” beyond which an engagement with and reception of an ancient “object” becomes meaningless, and/or simply a way of drawing on the cultural capital of the classical world without significant engagement with the source. As an example of the question, “how far before it breaks,” a contemporary “version” of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is offered for discussion, but it is also suggested that receptions in theatre are complicated by the multi-layered nature of theatre as a medium.
Module 1.4 takes the student on a brief survey of the reception of the Classical World in pre-digital film from its inception until the end of the so-called “Peplum era” during the 1950s and 1960s. These pre-digital receptions are important because they establish patterns of understanding and conventions of reception in the modern world that are both, at times, followed without significant variation in the digital era, but also at times extended into new areas in those later digital receptions.
Module 1.5 presents a range of receptions of the Classical World in pre-digital comics, setting up patterns within this medium that, on the one hand, pursue strategies that had already been set up in the ancient world in artistic predecessors of comics, but on the other hand also establish patterns that are taken up later by pre-digital and digital animations. In 1.6, a quick survey of receptions in primarily pre-digital SciFi similarly establishes patterns that are both followed and varied later in digital SciFi receptions of the Classical World (to be examined in Module 3.4-3.6).
Module 1.6
Recommended Readings
- Szeman, Imre and Suzie O’Brien. “History of Popular Culture.” In Szeman, Imre and Suzie O’Brien, eds. Popular Culture: A User’s Guide. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017, pp.29-55.
- Hall, Edith. “Putting the Class into Classical Receptions.” In Hardwick, Lorna & Christopher Stray. A Companion to Classical Receptions. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp.386-98.
- Rogers, Brett & Benjamin Stevens. “The Past is an Undiscovered Country.” In Rogers, Brett M. and Benjamin Eldon Stevens, eds. Classical Traditions in Science Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2015, pp.1-24.