This essay pursues the history of the widespread and influential claim that the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides anticipates the social concerns of modernity and the formal strategies of modernism. The claim originated at the same time as the development of the canon of German tragic criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Building on but importantly altering the ancient criticism of Euripides from Aristophanes and Aristotle, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller each understood Euripides in close and uncomfortable proximity to their own political moment. The criticism that developed out of this canon both identified Euripides as an untimely modern and produced a series of hostile appraisals of his work. In the conjuncture of modernism in the early twentieth century, professional classicists and modernist poets both accepted the claim of Euripides’ untimely modernity and transvalued its terms: the projection of a ruptural, anticipatory modernity onto Euripides allowed the tragedian to assume the cast of a fellow-traveler of the literary projects of modernism itself. Following the modernist conjuncture, the untimely modernity claim has thoroughly influenced, and frequently dominated, the translation, adaptation, and interpretation of Euripides both inside and outside the professional study of Classics.
The author explores the thematics of transsexuality, untranslatability, and figuration in a recent volume of poetry by the Canadian poet and scholar Trish Salah, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1. Lyric Sexology confronts historical, aesthetic, and political questions that are best understood in the framework of translation and its failure. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's philosophical reflections on untranslatables, the author argues that gender as a representational system necessarily experiences trans configurations of gender as untranslatables, which it “never ceases (not) translating.” The author deploys Salah's collection of poems, which explores a number of historical discourses and sciences oriented around understanding transsexuality, to help think through some of the questions that the paradigm of untranslatability opens. This article argues that Lyric Sexology stages an analogy between linguistic and literary translations and historical attempts to categorize transsexuality, thus rendering transsexuality legible within normative gender categories. In this account, categorization is treated as a historical analogue of translation, the repetitions and failures of which can be understood as a response to transsexuality as an untranslatable. Through a reading of Salah's poems, the author develops an interpretation of categorization as dependent upon figuration to achieve its intended effect of translating its targets into, in Salah's words, one “of those things you have words for.” The author's interpretation of Lyric Sexology through the history it proposes thus helps her to develop a paradigm for understanding the functions of untranslatability and figuration in determining the past and present configurations of trans social relations.
This essay argues for reading Kathy Acker in terms of what the author calls the “plasticity” of her sentences. These syntactic structures disclose Acker's attempt to expose and negate a bourgeois ideology of adolescence and maturity. The essay pursues this argument through a reading of Acker's novel In Memoriam to Identity, in particular its interest in Rimbaud as both biographical icon and literary precedent. The essay then argues that Acker's concerted literary attack on an ideology of maturity relates to the projects of trans literature at several critical junctures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.