Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (edition 2019)by Tom Geue (Author)
Work InformationAuthor Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome by Tom Geue
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. No reviews
This book is an important contribution to the thriving field of authorship studies on ancient literature. It challenges one of the biggest obsessions in historicist scholarship: to connect a given text to the nomen of its author: in the words of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , “we should not forget that the ancient horror vacui did not easily tolerate anonymous poems” (my translation). ... This stimulating book offers valuable insights and ideas. The introduction and the brief connecting pre-chapters help readers to orient themselves. ... Geue’s habitual prose style (including his translations, which are well done – but sometimes say more than the original text), often experimental and sometimes colloquial, is another “native mode” that may hinder “non-natives” from reading through it without some effort: however, they will benefit from cutting their way through the idiomatic thicket. Moreover, this book is an entertaining read from the beginning, delivering as its Monty Pythonesque motto a Roman graffito: “Much was inscribed [here] by many, I alone inscribed nothing.” (p. 1). This swirling treatment of the forces and facets of anonymous authorship in Roman literature will act as a hermeneutical counterbalance to attributionist, historicist and contextualist readings.
Classical scholarship tends to treat anonymous authorship as a problem or game-a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. But anonymity can be a source of meaning unto itself, rather than a gap that needs filling. Tom Geue's close readings of Latin texts show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)808.0471Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Rhetoric and anthologies Handbooks for writers LatinLC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
Tom Geue. Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome. 362pp, hardback. ISBN: 978-0-674-98820-0. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.
**
Given my current research into re-attribution of “Defoe” and “Shakespeare” texts, this book appeared to propose new methods for determining authorship even in the extreme obscurity of distant times such as ancient Rome. However, while the subject demands precision and standardized methods of comparison, this book is more digressive and speculative rather than practically useful. For example, while discussing the attribution of a poem, Laus Pisonis, Tom Geue moves away from the biography, and general “skill at composing poetry” of one of the proposed authors, and the patron this poet is flattering, Piso, to a long paragraph on the need for “contextualized” explanations. Yes, context is needed to explain why no specific attribution has yet been proposed, but not a page that questions if context is really needed. The style in which Geue is writing is deliberately intended to confuse readers rather than to hold their hand as he leads them through the clues in the mystery. For example, he writes: “The variation (mille modis) and simultaneity is exhausting. One piece turns hunted into hunter; another converts checked into checker” (153). If Geue defined these terms and explained how these meanings point to an attribution, this would have been useful. But commencing an explanation by confessing the author is exhausted by trying to understand it all himself repels readers from wanting to venture into this impassable jungle after a bewildered guide. The perfect example of how this book babbles on without really saying anything is this: “So the verse actually works well toward this end: the blanker, the better. Its value lies precisely in the fact that it doesn’t really tell us anything – and not knowing is what this early Apocol. is all about” (207). A value judgement between blank and non-blank verse is extremely subjective or a matter of personal preference: it is also irrelevant to the proposed subject of who wrote this text. And the second sentence, when taken in reverse, summarizes what is wrong with this book: it avoids saying anything through nonsensical circles around meaningless points; there is no “value” in saying “anything” without conveying meaning; it is better to refrain from publishing a book that says nothing as the silence would allow readers to research the subject for themselves.
Given these shortfalls, this book’s author convinced me to request it by its summary, so let’s consider how it fails to deliver what it promised. “An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature.” The word “sorcery” should have been a clue that the subject of attribution is treated here as if it’s black magic rather than as scientifically solvable. “From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us.” Here is another clue: the digression into Bansky suggests the digressions to come inside; if the book’s title promises a focus on the ancients, the author really should have stuck to this specialty. And what about this note on “unattributed” art being offensive? What do personal feelings of the viewers have to do with the need to methodically solve the mystery of whodunnit? “Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature.” This is another great example of nonsense writing: how viewers experience literature might be of interest to psychotherapists, but literature scholars should avoid such speculations. What are the possible answers to this line of questioning? Can we feel pretty good about not knowing who wrote something? Are some of us pretty sad about it? Who cares? Geue knows nobody cares and that’s why so few reviewers of scholarly texts venture into books such as this one to explain why they are nonsensical and awful. Here are a few examples that appear to specify how these abstract topics will be handled: “Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus’s sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid’s Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus’s Fables).” This does indeed approach the main objective behind any scientific attribution study, but fails to deliver this in the text. Anonymity has allowed scholars and publishers to attribute texts to the authors who benefit their careers or books sales: for example, as “Shakespeare” became popular, publishers added this attribution to more and more texts, and same has been the case with “Defoe”, as the latter’s numbers keep increasing annually and have long surpassed 550, a number that represents an incredibly large portion of all texts written in Britain in Defoe’s lifetime. My research has uncovered that Dyer ghostwrote James I’s Daemonologie, which contributed to added falsely accused murders of “witches”; while this work was not anonymous, James I could follow this murderous course without closely researching the topic of the existence of witchcraft because a ghostwriter stepped in to cover this defining text. Believing these words came from their monarch pushed Americans and Brits to continue their witch trials, whereas if Dyer’s name appeared on the cover, this release might have gone unnoticed. I have also uncovered the use of ghostwriters by clergy and academics in Britain in the “Shakespeare” period; hiring ghostwriters to create their sermons and books allowed these wealthy people to advance to the highest academic and political offices. There is nothing good or worthy of preservation in these problems. Trump would not be America’s president today if Americans were not led to believe in his intelligence based on the books he has had ghostwritten for him. If parents are going to be prosecuted for paying to admit their children into Ivy League colleges, we have to finally stop the overwhelming volume of problems created by a lack of scientific attribution methods to spot ghostwriters and other attribution-related problems. Instead of understanding this as the point of all attribution research, Geue digresses into the questioning why scholars interested in scientific linguistics want to say these ancient authors were bad people: “To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today’s.” It is idiotic to ignore that all authors still popular today from ancient times were not “hungry for fame”; fame is not accidental, but rather the result of propaganda and hyper-aggressive marketing across millennia. No, Geue, we must stop being accepting of “anonymity”, and we must indeed work “against it” when “it” has been used to assassinate and deprive incredible portions of humanity.
This book represents everything wrong with attribution scholarship today: its stated goal is to avoid attributing texts. Saying nothing is better than actively saying nonsense in the scholarly spaces that might otherwise be offered to scientific linguistic researchers that would actually solve these ancient mysteries for those among us who favor knowledge above the feelings of the privileged.