SCS-5: The Politics of Reception

Communities around the world claim the nickname of Athens. There are Athenses of the North (Edinburgh), the South (Adelaide), the East (Madurai), America (Boston), South America (Bogota), etc. Yet, nowhere are there more Athenses than the American Midwest.

Seneca’s De Otio, a first-century CE philosophical treatise, and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, an essay collection published in 1903, both attend to the relationships between leisure, learning, and political participation. Writing in exile, Seneca, once an imperial advisor, argues that learning offers a way to serve our fellow human beings. Du Bois, an African American scholar, writer, and activist, insists that freedpersons and their descendants in the United States require leisure to benefit themselves and the nation as a whole.

This paper examines the first Chinese translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric by Luo Niansheng (1904–1990). Completed in 1965, shortly before the start of the Cultural Revolution, Luo’s translation was only published posthumously in 1991. Since then, it has been celebrated as a masterpiece and a must-read for students of ancient Greek literature and culture in contemporary China. However, despite its significance, Luo’s translation of the Rhetoric has not yet been comprehensively studied.

In a recent contribution on Phillis Wheatley's use of the classical tradition, Emily Greenwood pinpointed a blind spot in current scholarship: critics tend to discount or neglect the potential complexity of the poet's engagement with Greek and Latin literature. Since then important new work has continued to appear on Wheatley's late 18th-c. American context, her life as an enslaved and then manumitted Black woman, and the full extent of her preserved writings (Carretta, Hairston, Roberts, Waldstreicher, e.g.), but her dynamic appropriation of classical texts remains underexplored.

María Cristina Mena (1893-1965) is the first Mexican-American woman whose short fiction gained wide American readership. Her stories have largely been dismissed as simple and unchallenging, pandering to an American audience by depicting a stereotyped Mexico filled with naïve Mexicans. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that her works can be read as pieces of opposition and resistance (Sheffer 2013; Toth 2013).