In the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching three quite different groups of students: first-year undergraduates, on a module billed as an overview of English literature; third-year undergraduates, on a module about the reception of Homer; and Year 10 students at a local secondary school, on an outreach course that I designed as an introduction to classical reception.
I taught the latter two groups in the same term, and, because of the similar subject areas, my third-years and my Year 10s often (unknowingly) had very similar discussions each week – despite the fact that they were at such different stages in their education. All of this got me thinking about how teaching classical reception, at any level, raises questions about how much of ourselves we bring to our studies.
A key aspect of my outreach course for Year 10 students was trying to encourage critical thinking at a university level. It’s obviously a difficult concept to define, but I emphasised elements such as looking beyond surface-level meaning, becoming an analytic rather than descriptive writer, and drawing conclusions based on textual evidence.
But, even as I set out these goals for the Year 10s, I wondered whether this emphasis on critical detachment and evidence-based reasoning was eclipsing another important aspect of learning about the ancient world: experiencing a sense of identity (or a conspicuous lack thereof) with texts across time. After all, theory tells us that meaning is formed at the point of reception – i.e., in the students themselves.
One of the texts that I discussed with both the Year 10 group and my third-year seminar was Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles, a novella which primarily focuses on the story of the eponymous Greek hero. It ends, however, with a section called ‘Relay’, in which the narrative jumps abruptly from Achilles and the Trojan War to John Keats in 19th century London – so abruptly, in fact, that one of my third-years commented that they initially thought they’d opened the wrong book. But this shock is absolutely deliberate, because ‘Relay’ seems designed to raise questions about how literature makes its readers feel, and more widely, about the relationship between ourselves and what we read.
In it, Keats is reading various texts connected to Achilles and the Trojan war – Troilus and Cressida, Chapman’s Homer, Dante’s Inferno. Cook describes how Keats underlines (and ‘double underlines’) words from Troilus and Cressida, so moved is he by Shakespeare’s rendering of Achilles’ physical presence. This layered depiction of reading inevitably extends its reach onto the reader of Achilles: in a stream of consciousness that seems to belong to Keats, Cook asks:
Who are we when we read? Or when we listen to the story of another? When we attend a performance? Is there not a tiny, palpable, nervous participation: the thin end of a wedge whose wide end is visible action? Do we not, in a small way, imitate? (page 77)
Both of my classical reception groups responded to this text by offering – unprompted – their own experiences of coming across figures from the past or entire texts that spoke to them in the way that Achilles speaks to Keats in Cook’s novella; in the way that Hector describes to one of his students in The History Boys:
‘And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’
They mentioned formative reading experiences, including the importance of representation – characters that they felt similar to – but also texts and characters that challenged their own sense of identity. Meaning is formed at the point of reception – but the receiver is not a fixed point. Teaching classical reception has shown me, more clearly than any reading or research I’ve done, that reception is a two-way process: that our students are changed by the texts they read, as well as being active participants in the re-creation of those texts’ meanings.
