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Responsive Reading

By Irene Peirano Garrison

Classical philology has traditionally operated under a positivistic and historicist model of reading as a process of recovery of the original, be that configured as an original source, original thought or wording. Such an approach has been buttressed by philology’s long-standing claim to being an emic mode of reading, originating in Greco-Roman antiquity and therefore holding the greatest promise of intimacy with the classical world.

Bad Readers: Anecdote, Affect and Audience in Ancient Virgilian Literary Criticism

By Talitha E. Z. Kearey

Ancient literary critics are, for many modern scholars, fundamentally ‘bad’ readers. It is often observed that ancient literary scholarship – ranging from commentaries or scholia to technical treatises, from author-biographies to encyclopaedias – seems to lag far behind the theoretical sophistication perceivable in ancient literature itself.

sunt mihi multae curae: Self-Writing and the Emotional Reader

By Catherine Conybeare

Autobiography—perhaps better termed “self-narration” or “self-writing” to circumvent anachronistic genre conventions (Zak 2012)—lays a particular burden of engagement on the reader. The self within the text calls to the self, or selves, outside the text, expecting, commanding, pleading for a moment of encounter. Part of the point of constructing the text as a first-person narration is arguably to invite emotional identification of reader with writer (Cowley 2015).