This session will explore how the category of “classical” has impacted cultural production and literary histories both within and beyond the Western framework in which it emerged. Its current usage in literary terminology can be traced to the eighteenth century, when the term began to be employed in Europe to designate the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome as embodying a cultural ideal. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when the concepts of Classical Arabic and Classical Chinese appeared as objects of European scholarship, the term has come to be applied to a vast array of languages and literatures, to the extent that it has become a near-universal category in the mapping of world literary history. Responding to recent scholarship within the field of Classical Reception Studies, the session will seek to advance scholarly understanding of the complex operations of the category of “classical” through a series of case studies.

The session will comprise three papers and a response. The papers that have been selected explore the category of “classical” from substantially different perspectives, but they have sufficient overlap to enable a productive conversation between participants. Thus, they cover a limited timespan, from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century; they all engage questions of cultural identity; and they all concern projects that feature an element of differentiation or contestation vis-à-vis European classicism. Beyond these commonalities, each paper offers distinctive insights into the topic.

Victoria Larson’s paper, “Thomas Jefferson and the International Politics of the ‘Classical’” will explore the dual function of “classical” Greco-Roman culture in the works of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). On one hand, references to Greco-Roman culture in Jefferson’s writings served as a means of establishing cultural kinship with Europe. On the other hand, particularly in Jefferson’s architectural works, the “classical” style functioned as a signifier of absolute universal values by which, paradoxically, American exceptionalism vis-à-vis the Old World—and ultimately America’s imperial aspirations—were expressed.

Ido Telem’s paper, “National Classicisms: The Classicizing Gesture in the Hebrew Revival,” will examine the turn to the Bible by the proclaimed Hebrew national poet, H. N. Bialik (1873–1934). For Bialik, like other Hebrew revivalists of his era, the Bible represented an alternative to the theological and legalistic texts that had been the principal focus of Jewish life in the diaspora for nearly two millennia. Comparing the case of Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) turn to the Greeks in the context of German national-identity formation, Telem’s paper will construe Bialik’s turn to the Bible as a classicizing gesture—equivalent in form to Schiller’s use of the Greeks, though widely divergent in content.

Yassine Ait Ali’s paper, “Canonization and the Genius: Ruhi al-Khalidi on the Concept of the Classic(al),” will focus on a pioneering work of comparative literature by the Palestinian intellectual Ruhi al-Khalidi (1864–1913). In his History of the Science of Literature (1902), al-Khalidi employed concepts of literary analysis then current in European universities—notably, “genius” and “influence”—to establish the merits of certain “classical” Arabic poets, particularly Imruʾ al-Qays (d. 554) and al-Mutanabbi (d. 965), over major figures of the European canon. Ali’s paper reads Khalidi’s work as an exercise in cultural resistance against European imperialism, wherein the European canon of “classics” is undermined on its own theoretical terms.

This session was conceived in response to what the Postclassicisms Collective—a group of prominent scholars of Greco-Roman culture and its reception—referred to in their eponymous 2019 work, in a chapter titled “World,” as “the challenge to globalize classics.” For these authors, the challenge is essentially how to conduct scholarship and instruction on ancient Greece and Rome in a worldly manner, given two circumstances. First, there are now “many classicisms (including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Indian, and others).” Second, “we can now speak of a classics that is much more than Mediterranean: acts of classical reception [i.e. of Greco-Roman culture] can be found in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, many parts of the Islamic world ... and Central and South America.” This session is organized on the basis that the immediate and primary challenge is in fact to understand how the category of the “classical” has shaped and/or distorted literary histories and literary production on a global scale since the eighteenth century; that is, to interrogate the operations and complicities of the category itself.

Each presenter will be allotted 16 minutes. There will then be a response of 8 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for unstructured discussion.