Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid
Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid is an academic
Darkness Visible was met with mixed reviews with commentators praising its central claims but criticising its argumentation, style, and bibliographic documentation. The book is also credited with coining the term 'Harvard school' to describe a brand of pessimistic Vergil scholarship produced in the English-speaking world. Even though the designation established itself in academic discourse, it was rejected in 1995 by one of the school's proponents, Wendell Clausen.
Publication
Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid was written by the American classicist W. R. Johnson and published by University of California Press in 1976. The original edition had 179 pages.[1] In 2015, University of Chicago Press published a second edition of the work.[2]
Summary
In a first expository chapter ('Eliot's Myth and Vergil's Fictions'), Johnson reviews critical opinions about
The book's second chapter ('Lessing, Auerbach, Gombrich: The Norm of Reality and the Spectrum of Decorum') analyses Vergil's style by juxtaposing his
The final chapter ('The Worlds Vergil Lived In') uses the observations of the preceding two chapters to arrive at an overall interpretation of the poem. Johnson here employs the multiple levels of meaning proposed by Nicolaus of Lyra. He argues that Aeneid depicts on the first, allegorical level the insecurities of Roman society during the tumultuous transition from the
Reception
The book received mixed reviews upon publication. The British Latinist Nicholas Horsfall considered it "difficult, wayward, and provocative" while conceding that it was "deeply stimulating, often entertaining, and strikingly independent in outlook". He accepted Johnson's claim that the world of the Aeneid is chaotic and dark, but criticised the book for a number of inaccuracies including interpretation, bibliographic documentation, and awareness of contemporary scholarship.[3] In a review for Arion, the classicist William Porter praised the book for rejecting the predominant social-political interpretation of the poem.[4] Sharing Horsfall's assessment, he endorsed the book's analysis of Vergil's negative imagery[5] but wrote that Johnson failed to see the wider implications of his observations and pursued his main line of argumentation "to the exclusion of all others".[6]
Several reviewers commented on Johnson's writing style. For the Vergil scholar Harry Rutledge, the book's style exhibited "the remarkable qualities of the oracular, the arcane, the arrestingly simple", although it suffered from the "aphoristic brevity" of its arguments.[7] The poet K. W. Gransden, on the other hand, thought that Johnson had a tendency to unnecessary obscurity and mystification.[8] He also objected to the use of untranslated quotation of ancient Greek and the lack of bibliographic documentation.[9]
Harvard school
In the first chapter, Johnson divides previous scholarship of the Aeneid into a 'European' and a 'Harvard' school. The latter term in particular became a standard descriptor for the pessimistic scholarship of the poem, produced in the English-speaking world.[10] In 1995, Clausen, whom Johnson had identified as a proponent of the Harvard School, published a short article about the term. Crediting Johnson with inventing it, he argues that the designation is a misnomer since most of the ideas central to his school of thought originated at places other than Harvard University. Instead, Clausen suggests that he and Parry formed some of their thoughts about the poem while working at Amherst College.[11]
References
- ^ Horsfall 1979, p. 231.
- .
- ^ Horsfall 1979, p. 233.
- ^ Porter 1976, p. 493.
- ^ Porter 1976, p. 496.
- ^ Porter 1976, p. 497.
- ^ Rutledge 1977, p. 73.
- ^ Gransden 1978, p. 248.
- ^ Gransden 1978, pp. 248–249.
- ^ Tarrant 2012, pp. 16–17, n. 66.
- ^ Clausen 1995, p. 313.
Bibliography
- S2CID 164147641.
- Clausen, Wendell (1995). "Appendix". In ISBN 978-0-585-34024-1.
- Horsfall, Nicholas (1979). "Review of W. R. Johnson 'Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid'". JSTOR 299096.
- Porter, William (1976). "Review: A Look at Vergil's Negative Image". JSTOR 20163436.
- Rutledge, Harry (1977). "Review of R. W. Johnson Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid". JSTOR 41591778.
- ISBN 978-1-316-09859-2.