Bibliography

Abstract

Against recent attempts to argue that generic distinctions between history and other forms are not particularly relevant to analysis of how the divine is represented, this paper argues that generic distinctions are important from Herodotus on. History has its own distinctive discursive practices, however inventively historians work on the margins with other genres such as epic and tragedy.© Denis Feeney. dfeeney@princeton.edu 2 On not forgetting the "Literatur" in "Literatur und Religion":Representing the Mythic and the Divine in Roman Historiography "a little formalism turns one away from History, but … a lot brings one back to it." Roland Barthes 1As one of only two Latinists speaking at a conference on the interaction between literature and religion, I found myself reflecting on the historical differences in practice between the subdisciplines of Hellenists and Latinists. Generalisations on such large topics are difficult and suspect, yet my own attempts as a Latinist in a Hellenists' conference to negotiate between the claims of literature and religion made me very self-conscious about the disciplinary issues. I was left feeling isolated in some kind of middle ground, subject to a pincer movement from both flanks. On one side was Latin studies, where a historicising reaction against long-dominant formalism has been gathering momentum for some time, with cultural studies and anthropologically informed approaches making headway against supposedly solipsistic textual readings; on the other side was Greek studies, where the gravitational pull of sociological and anthropological models of great power has been in effect for so long that formalism is scarcely on the horizon at all, and is no longer perceived as a past threat, let alone as a present or future one. My feeling of being stranded in the middle comes from my belief that formalism and cultural studies need each other, and are inextricably involved with each other. My natural allies, then, are those Latinists who agree with Don 3 Fowler in thinking that we need "to deconstruct oppositions like 'formalism' vs.'historicism'".2 As Fowler puts it in his wide-ranging discussion of intertextuality:"'Intertextuality' is often associated with a formalist approach to literature, and contrasted with forms of cultural criticism that go outside the text. This seems to me to embody a narrow view of text and a naivety about the way the things supposedly 'outside' the text are alwaysThe difficulty we all faced at our conference was how to read texts within the penumbra of "literature and religion" without leaning so far to the formalist end of the scale that we shut out the texts' social and religious ramifications, and without leaning so far to the historicist end of the scale that we allow those other cultural discourses to suffocate the distinctive nature of the texts. The danger with the formalism against which so many Latinists are reacting is that it has in practice made it very difficult to take the religious (or social or cultural)dimensions of literature at all ...