Without Within: Parenthetic Interferences in Reception History - John Thomas Hamilton

Classical reception has always implied a parenthetical relationship insofar as Antiquity appears to be inserted into (en) while remaining alongside (para) Modernity. As in any parenthetical statement, the ancient source can be said to be a part of and apart from modern revisions and reworkings, recontextualizations and reorientations, belonging to a present discourse by maintaining its status beyond it. Through this rhetorical figure, Without Within broaches fresh questions and offers new lines of inquiry in the ever-growing and disparate field of Reception Studies, a field that itself continues to occupy an intriguingly ambivalent position within Classical Studies overall: simultaneously inside and outside, profane and sacred, an included exclusion. As Quintilian defines it, a parenthesis is a figure of thought (figura sententiae) that occurs “when some thought in the middle interrupts [intervenit] the continuation of a discourse” (Inst. orat. 9, 3.23). In modern typography, this interruption or intervention is generally marked by brackets which introduce a further element of difference or heteronomy vis-à-vis the body of the text. As for specific cases of classical reception, a contrast is thereby staged between the essence of the ancient material and its modern purpose, between the what-is and the what-for. By investigating a series of exemplary instances of reception across several epochs, languages, and cultures, Hamilton aims to delineate and assess the
více informací