Scholarship & Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover (edited by Stephen Halliwell and Christopher Stray) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dover and the Public Face of Classics [author's MS]
Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover (eds. Stephen Halliwell and Christopher Stray), 2023
This chapter [from Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover, eds. S. Halliwell and C. Stray] supplements the book’s treatments of Dover’s substantive scholarship, as well as the biographically orientated pieces, by examining how his intellectual values informed his conception of Classics (especially the Greek half of the subject) as a discipline. It offers close readings of four pieces which Dover wrote for, roughly speaking, non-specialist audiences: his 1976 Presidential Address to the Classical Association; a 1979 lecture (published in 1984, and overlapping with material in his book The Greeks) to the 7th congress of FIEC (International Federation of Associations of Classical Studies) in Budapest; a 1985 lecture entitled ‘What are the “Two Cultures”?’; and a short article from 1988 in an Italian magazine, L’humana avventura (this last piece is translated in an appendix to his chapter). Among the strands of thought drawn out from these publications are Dover’s life-long rejection of many standard ‘defences’ and educational-cum-cultural justifications of Classics (especially those which posit the supposed uniqueness of Greco-Roman civilisation, its special status as the ‘origin’ of the modern West, the canonical standing of its literature, and its value as the basis of a normative humanism) and his replacement of these by a conception of ‘history’ which embraces all the main intellectual activities of the humanities. On the basis of this conception of history, which he thought of as anthropologically inflected, Dover maintained that there is ‘smooth continuity’ between past and present, allowing the present to learn from the past even across gulfs of time. The chapter carefully explores the ramifications of these and related convictions of Dover’s.
Stephen Halliwell [The following is the text, as delivered, of the memorial lecture 'Kenneth Dover and the Greeks' given under the auspices of the Hellenic Society on April 4 th 2011 in the Chancellor's Hall, Senate House, London, and attended by members of Sir Kenneth's family, by former colleagues, students, and friends, and by a wider audience. SH]
Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover, 2023
Dover was by any standards a brave scholar. To write the cultural history of human sexuality in a far away moment, having already attempted that of popular morality, was bold, and it remains a fraught topic. 1 To focus on homosexuality, which in the year of publication (1978) had only been legal for eleven years, since 1967, in England and Wales, and had yet to be legalized in Scotland (where Dover began his work on this topic), again reflects his courage (legalization eventually took place in Scotland in 1980 and in Northern Ireland in 1982). 2 The book caught the spirit of the times: in June 1977 his most brilliant Balliol student, Bernard Williams, 3 was appointed by the Labour Government to chair a committee on obscenity, which published a liberalizing report in 1979. 4 Dover's work thus stood within a revolution in attitudes in Britain, between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, 5 and at the heart of changes within the scholarly community. Such changes included freeing-up of the censorship laws, especially in the 1960s. 6 The timeliness of Dover's inquiry in the1970s goes alongside the discovery, for instance in the work of Masters and Johnson, that one could speak about sex and sexuality in the current moment, 7 which liberated the historian to ask questions about the 'unspeakable' in the past. In the transforming popular culture, it went side by side with the Women's Liberation movement of the same period (Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch was published in 1970), itself not unrelated to the licensing of the contraceptive pill in 1960 in America and 1961 in Britain. 8 To do justice to Greek homosexuality, Dover saw he had to extend his command of the relevant material to areas well beyond his normal expertise-an acute perception, 9 although the history of ancient sex had earlier already turned to the visual. 10 By Dover's art history, I mean specifically his attempt to use the visual evidence of Greek painted pottery in order to write Greek Homosexuality-an evidential base that was empirically essential to the project, and has become a fundamental underpinning of the many histories of ancient sexuality that have been founded on his book. That these should include the work of Foucault as well as that of numerous classicists, 11 has meant that Dover's project stands at the epicentre of some of the most important work in the humanities in the last half century, across all disciplines. Dover's art history stands at the empirical base of the entirety of that collective project, which makes the topic significant well beyond a centenary celebration of his scholarly achievements. Dover rightly saw that literary evidence was insufficient to his theme and the visual materials were key. 12 Note that by 'visual' I mean 'iconographical' since it is purely by CHAPTER 12