Beyond the Case Study: Theorizing Classical Reception

In 1428 the humanist poet Maffeo Vegio, then a young law student at Pavia, wrote a thirteenth book to Vergil’s Aeneid – a continuation of the existing text designed to tidy up and resolve the loose ends of Vergil’s notoriously inconclusive epic. Indeed, Vegio’s Aeneid supplement was not the first of its kind: eight years earlier, Pier Candido Decembrio undertook to write a supplement to the Aeneid, though his truncated effort never achieved the international celebrity of Vegio’s version.

The writings of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 1899 - Geneva, 1986) have not been considered as a ground for broader theoretical thinking about Classical Reception. With the exception of a study in Spanish in Borges’ translations of Homer and Virgil (García Jurado and Salazar Morales), and despite the interest in modern theory in Borges (e.g. Wood), the question of Borges’ classical receptions in theory remains unexplored. This is possibly because Borges’ engagement with classical antiquity is seldom fully sustained in his oeuvre.

This paper will address the themes of the panel by looking at recent scholarship on the philosophy of tragedy as a phenomenon of classical reception (e.g. Billings & Leonard). It will maintain that within this tradition the idea of Greek tragedy as reconstructed in part from Shakespeare’s plays continues to play a role in the testing of hypotheses about the relative merits of the three main ancient tragedians. It will do this, in particular, via a reading of A.C.

Why should we go beyond the case study in reception studies when the case study has been so fruitful? This paper finds its starting point in the evident success of case studies – the detailed analysis of a delimited example, be it from literature, art, theatre: reception study has become a boom subject.