Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission (Classics and Contemporary Thought, 3, Band 3) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520206029 ISBN 13: 9780520206021

Verlag: University of California Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

Re-Reading Sappho reflects the recent fascination with Sappho's "afterlife." The essays examine the changing interpretations of scholars and writers who have read the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poetry. As the contributors explore the ways that each generation creates its own Sappho, the Sapphic tradition itself becomes an index to changing sensibilities and cultural norms about sexuality, gender roles, and notions of fema le authorship.

A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellen Greene is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma.

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Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission

By Ellen Greene, editor

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Ellen Greene, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520206029
Introduction
Ellen Greene

The greatness of a number of writers from antiquity is so thoroughly unquestioned that they are always granted a place in the annals of literature. Yet none but Sappho has become a truly legendary figure.
Joan DeJean

As poet, as legendary literary figure, Sappho has had an undeniable fascination for readers ever since she composed her poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C.E . From Plato's celebration of Sappho as the tenth Muse to Robin Morgan's renunciation of Sappho as literary foremother ("get off my back, Sappho"), the life and lyrics of Sappho have haunted the Western imagination. Sappho's intense, burning verses of feminine desire have presided over the Western lyric much the way Homer's epics have occupied their authoritative position in Western literature. Sappho comes down to us as a kind of mother goddess of poetry: imitated, ventriloquized, renounced, worshiped, and feared, as perhaps no other single poet in the Western tradition.

Why has Sappho come to "inhabit the popular imagination" with so much intensity? Why have her poetics and her persona engendered centuries of fantasy, speculation, and mythmaking? Indeed, Joan DeJean points out that fictions about Sappho started circulating within centuries of her death. To Socrates and Plato, Sappho is the exemplary Sublime Poetess, an authority in matters of love. To the writers of late antiquity, Sappho becomes not only priestess of song but exemplar of the woman who died for love—reputedly flinging herself off the white cliff of Leukas for the love of a ferryman. Interest in Sappho, in both the scholarly and literary traditions, has often reflected a voyeuristic fascination with the "queerness" of a woman writing poetry in which men are "relegated to a peripheral, if not an intrusive, role."1 Curiosity about Sappho over the centuries has been fueled by the fragmentary condition of her poems, the lack of any concrete information about her life, and the implications of homoeroticism

DeJean, "Fictions of Sappho," 790.

in her work—implications that all too often have been regarded as sexual "deviance."

Aside from the provocative images of lesbian love that have disturbed many readers through the ages, one of the most compelling aspects of Sappho fiction—making arises from the tendency readers have had to fill in the gaps of Sappho's mutilated texts. Modern scholars have been faced with the problem of how to piece together Sappho's surviving fragments. Nearly all of Sappho's surviving poems have major breaks in the text or are short excerpts from a longer poem. Many of the approximately two hundred fragments attributed to Sappho contain only one or two words. Out of the nine books of her poetry edited by scholars at the great library in Alexandria during the third and second centuries B.C.E ., only forty fragments are long enough to be intelligible. Thus, much of the scholarly work on Sappho from the early part of the century to the 1960s focused on textual and philological analysis and reconstruction. Scholarship on the content of Sappho's poetry emphasized efforts to construct her biography—often with the aim of endowing Sappho with "Victorian" respectability. And of course the association of Sappho with female homoeroticism has made her, for many readers, a fascinating yet often problematic subject of speculation and fantasy. In 1913, the classical scholar Wilamowitz declared Sappho to be the official leader of a cult of female worshipers devoted to Aphrodite.2 The notion of Sappho as the head of a thiasos or religious cult for young girls dominated Sappho scholarship and did much to rationalize away the homoerotic aspects of her poetry. As Holt Parker argues in his essay in this volume, "Sappho Schoolmistress," the image of Sappho presiding over a School of Virgins became canonical in early Sappho scholarship, giving rise to a multitude of related speculations about Sappho as music teacher and sex educator for a cultlike circle of young girls.

Edgar Lobel and Denys Page's 1955 commentary on Sappho marked a turning point in Sappho scholarship. Their book, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta , with a complete text and commentary on Sappho's fragments, became the definitive edition of Sappho's poems and, to a large extent, resolved the philological issues of textual reconstruction. Within a decade or so of their commentary, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an efflorescence of literary and contextual criticism emerged in which scholars began to read Sappho's poetry for its literary content and its relation to literary and mythical tradition. Changes in Sappho criticism, moreover, coincided with general changes in classical scholarship; in the 1970s efforts to assimilate methodologies from other branches of literary and cultural studies began to

Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides 17-78.

appear. In addition, feminist scholarship and, more recently, gender theory and criticism have provoked discussions about how Sappho's gender has both shaped her poetic discourse and influenced the social context of her poetry.

The essays collected in this volume reflect not only the burgeoning interest in Sappho over the last thirty years, but a more recent fascination with Sappho's "afterlife"—the seemingly endless permutations wrought upon her life and her work through centuries of literary and scholarly readings and rewritings. The history of Sappho imitations, translations, and scholarship is a history of images and perceptions, fictions and fantasies. As many of these essays show, each age, each generation invents its own Sappho. The authors in this volume examine the ways scholars and writers have read the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poetry and have, to a large extent, created the Sappho they wanted. As Jack Winkler astutely remarked, "Novelists, scholars, and ambitious young literary men (and women), although they knew nothing about Sappho's actual poetry, used her as a Rorschach blot projecting their fantasies and anxieties about sex, gender, and genius."3 Indeed Sappho's association with female homoeroticism, the fragmentary nature of her work, and the fact that so little is known about her life have generated a multitude of fictions about her—fictions that are themselves fascinating because they reflect the particular cultural attitudes and biases out of which those fictions emerged. "To retrace the development of fictions of Sappho," DeJean writes, "is both to measure the standards imposed on female sexuality at any given period and to provide an index, across the centuries, not only of the received ideas about female same-sex love but also of what it was possible to write about that subject at any given period."4 Thus, Sappho, as subject of scholarly investigation, translation, and myth, becomes an extraordinary means of access to changing sensibilities and cultural norms about sexuality, gender roles, and notions of female authorship. When we read the history of Sappho scholarship and the numerous translations and imitations of her work, we see how Sappho is, as Yopie Prins points out, "continually transformed and refigured in the process of transmission." Indeed, the study of Sappho reception raises questions about how literary voice may be recuperated through reading and how Sappho...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520206029
• ISBN 13: 9780520206021
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Herausgeber: Greene Ellen
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar