Reflections on the Eighteenth-Century Canon
Disciplinary Change in the Humanities
Like the Irish in the famous aphorism on “the Irish problem,” students of the humanities and social sciences are institutionally committed and constitutionally disposed to “changing the problem.” So it is no surprise to classicists that Gregory Nagy’s Plato bears little resemblance to Walter Pater’s, or to Shakespearians that Jan Kott’s Shakespeare has ceased to be their contemporary. Many students of Classics and English Literature acknowledge this feature of their enterprise, and have learned to be cautious about claiming too much for their judgments. As E. R. Dodds has remarked, in the humanities “the verdict of history is best represented not by a ...
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