经典与凯尔特文学现代主义:叶芝、乔伊斯、麦克迪亚米德和琼斯》,格雷戈里-贝克著(评论)

IF 0.1 4区 文学 0 LITERATURE, BRITISH ISLES
Nathan Wallace
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It would be better, according to Baker, to avoid generalizations that obscure the specific pathways by which \"Classics\" have been received and passed down from ancient times to our own. He is a good storyteller, too. Baker can deftly render the situation and draw us into it, and he demonstrates this skill in every section of the book. These are well researched and well told stories, and, while reading this book, I often felt I was reading excerpts from an intellectual biography or a series of biographical essays.</p> <p>Speaking of avoiding generalizations, however, I would have recommended some term other than \"Celtic Literary Modernism.\" It sounds like Baker might be suggesting that W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones, and Hugh MacDiarmid belonged to a coherent literary movement, and that does not sound right to me. 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Perhaps the new ideas would shed new light on the old ones, but Baker's stories are so detailed, and his contextualization is so thorough that I have a hard time locating the argument.</p> <p>I cannot speak as well to what one would normally expect from a monograph on Jones or MacDiarmid, but I would guess that what Baker has to say about them reflects more innovative research than what we see...</p> </p>","PeriodicalId":42413,"journal":{"name":"JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Macdiarmid, and Jones by Gregory Baker (review)\",\"authors\":\"Nathan Wallace\",\"doi\":\"10.1353/jjq.2023.a927927\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\\n<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Macdiarmid, and Jones</em> by Gregory Baker <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Nathan Wallace (bio) </li> </ul> <em>CLASSICS AND CELTIC LITERARY MODERNISM: YEATS, JOYCE, MACDIARMID, AND JONES</em>, by Gregory Baker. 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引用次数: 0

摘要

以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要:评论者: 经典与凯尔特文学现代主义:经典与凯尔特文学现代主义:叶芝、乔伊斯、麦克迪亚米德和琼斯》,格雷戈里-贝克著,内森-华莱士(简历)。剑桥大学出版社,2022 年:剑桥大学出版社,2022 年。xxiv + 299 pp.99.99 美元(布书、电子书)。格雷戈里-贝克在《古典文学与凯尔特文学现代主义》一书的导言中解释说,他采用的是一种 "叙事历史主义 "的批评写作模式,这种模式非常依赖于讲故事和密集的历史语境(xv)。贝克认为,最好避免泛泛而谈,以免掩盖 "经典 "从古至今被接受和传承的具体途径。他也很会讲故事。贝克能巧妙地渲染情境,吸引我们进入其中,他在书中的每一部分都展示了这一技巧。这些故事都是经过精心研究和讲述的,在阅读本书时,我常常觉得自己是在阅读一本知识分子传记或一系列传记散文的节选。不过,说到避免一概而论,我建议使用 "凯尔特文学现代主义 "以外的术语。这听起来像是贝克在暗示W. B. 叶芝、詹姆斯-乔伊斯、戴维-琼斯和休-麦克迪亚米德属于一个连贯的文学运动,而这在我看来并不正确。如今,即使是 "凯尔特人 "一词也存在争议,至少在史前学家中间是如此。贝克指出,"古典 "一词的含义极为广泛。它可以指古希腊或古罗马的任何事物,无论是文学、语言、政治还是历史。无论是在政治修辞中,还是在受过高等教育的人的日常对话中,这些提法都很常见。对于贝克的研究来说,最重要的定义是古典研究这一学科本身,在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初 [完 177 页] ,这一学科在英国、美国和爱尔兰的教育体系中被英语系所取代。我并不认为教育的发展对爱尔兰民族主义和爱尔兰现代主义的发展产生了贝克所说的那么大的影响,但他确实指出了比我想象中更多的联系。在接受调查的作家中,叶芝对这种巧合最有发言权,他明确表示这是一件重要的事情。与叶芝所说的对其文学和政治思想的发展非常重要的许多其他因素相比,古典文学的衰落有多重要则是另一回事。对于对这些现代作家如何接受古典文学感兴趣的古典学家来说,贝克的叙事历史主义方法应该很有启发性。不过,从爱尔兰研究的角度来看,贝克为我们讲述的关于叶芝、约翰-米林顿-辛格和乔伊斯的故事及其背景并不特别新颖。在关于叶芝翻译索福克勒斯的《俄狄浦斯王》1 的章节中,我们了解到叶芝为修道院剧院翻译《俄狄浦斯王》的安排如何落空,以及他如何在不懂希腊语的情况下最终整理出自己的译本。然后我们听说,叶芝成熟的美学在某种程度上就是从这个过程中发展起来的。这并不是一个新故事,而且在很多方面都有争论,但贝克并没有告诉我们这些先前的争论,因此他关于发生了变化这一事实的陈述并不如对这一变化的批判性分析那样令人满意(对我而言)。在关于乔伊斯的 "复兴的误译 "一章中,贝克对 "忒勒马科斯 "情节中巴克-穆里根的希腊语知识的看法是新的,但他对爱尔兰复兴派译者用语的长篇解释,以及乔伊斯如何在 "独眼巨人 "中用自己的译者用语模仿这种译者用语,并不新鲜。也许新观点会给旧观点带来新的启示,但贝克的故事是如此详尽,他的背景分析是如此透彻,以至于我很难找到论点。我不能说人们通常会对琼斯或麦克迪亚米德的专著抱有怎样的期望,但我猜测贝克对他们的论述反映了比我们所看到的更具创新性的研究......
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Macdiarmid, and Jones by Gregory Baker (review)
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Macdiarmid, and Jones by Gregory Baker
  • Nathan Wallace (bio)
CLASSICS AND CELTIC LITERARY MODERNISM: YEATS, JOYCE, MACDIARMID, AND JONES, by Gregory Baker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xxiv + 299 pp. $99.99 cloth, ebook.

In his introduction to Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism, Gregory Baker explains that he is using a "narrative historicist" mode of critical writing, which relies heavily on storytelling and dense historical contextualization (xv). It would be better, according to Baker, to avoid generalizations that obscure the specific pathways by which "Classics" have been received and passed down from ancient times to our own. He is a good storyteller, too. Baker can deftly render the situation and draw us into it, and he demonstrates this skill in every section of the book. These are well researched and well told stories, and, while reading this book, I often felt I was reading excerpts from an intellectual biography or a series of biographical essays.

Speaking of avoiding generalizations, however, I would have recommended some term other than "Celtic Literary Modernism." It sounds like Baker might be suggesting that W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones, and Hugh MacDiarmid belonged to a coherent literary movement, and that does not sound right to me. Even the term "Celt" is controversial nowadays, at least among pre-historians.

Baker demonstrates that the term Classics is extremely wide-ranging in its possible referents. It could mean simply references to anything Ancient Greek or Ancient Roman, whether literary, linguistic, political, or historical. These references are common in political rhetoric as well as in the everyday conversation of highly educated people. The most important definition for Baker's study is the academic discipline of Classical Studies itself, a discipline which was being displaced by Departments of English in the British, American, and Irish educational systems during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth [End Page 177] centuries. I am not convinced that this development in education has had as much of an impact on the development of Irish Nationalism and Irish Modernism as Baker suggests, but he does point to a larger number of connections than I would have imagined. Among the authors surveyed, Yeats has the most to say about this coincidence and explicitly comments that this is an important thing. How important the decline of Classics was, compared to the many other elements Yeats said were important to the development of his own literary and political ideas, is another matter.

For Classicists interested in how the Classics have been received by these modern writers, Baker's narrative historicist approach should be very instructive. From an Irish Studies perspective, however, the stories Baker tells us about Yeats and John Milington Synge and Joyce, and their contexts, are not particularly new. In his chapter on Yeats's translation of Sophocles's Oedipus the King,1 we learn all about how Yeats's arrangements to get a translation of Oedipus written for the Abbey Theater fell through, and how he finally put together his own translation even though he did not know Greek. Then we hear that Yeats's mature aesthetics were developed in some ways from this process. This is not a new story, and it has been debated in many ways, but Baker does not tell us about these prior arguments, and so his statements about the fact that a change happened are not as satisfying (to me) as a critical analysis of that change. In his chapter on Joyce's "Mistranslation of Revival," Baker's take on Buck Mulligan's knowledge of Greek in the "Telemachus" episode is new, but his long explanation of Irish Revivalist translator-ese, and how Joyce parodies it in "Cyclops" with his own translator-ese, is not new. Perhaps the new ideas would shed new light on the old ones, but Baker's stories are so detailed, and his contextualization is so thorough that I have a hard time locating the argument.

I cannot speak as well to what one would normally expect from a monograph on Jones or MacDiarmid, but I would guess that what Baker has to say about them reflects more innovative research than what we see...

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来源期刊
JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY
JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY LITERATURE, BRITISH ISLES-
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期刊介绍: Founded in 1963 at the University of Tulsa by Thomas F. Staley, the James Joyce Quarterly has been the flagship journal of international Joyce studies ever since. In each issue, the JJQ brings together a wide array of critical and theoretical work focusing on the life, writing, and reception of James Joyce. We encourage submissions of all types, welcoming archival, historical, biographical, and critical research. Each issue of the JJQ provides a selection of peer-reviewed essays representing the very best in contemporary Joyce scholarship. In addition, the journal publishes notes, reviews, letters, a comprehensive checklist of recent Joyce-related publications, and the editor"s "Raising the Wind" comments.
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