Untimeliness

To look back self-consciously to the classical past is inevitably to evoke an idea of untimeliness. The idealism of Philhellenism depends on the sense of temporal distance which separates modernity from antiquity, as it looks forward to a political and artistic future based on such classical ideals. The here-and-now is the scene of loss and hope rather than fulfillment or full presence. The often-expressed fantasy that the Greek world is the only place where the Romantic yearner could feel at home, declares that the writer is out of joint with his own time. To be a classicist, it might be thought, is to open oneself always to the charge of not being fully of one’s own time: dusty and backward looking or revolutionary and staring at a brighter future. Nietzsche is the best-know (yearning) theorist of the untimely, but untimeliness as an idea marks the crucial question of the subject’s relation to – and self-consciousness of – time and one’s place in history. Why do proclamations of modernity – the space of the timely — so repeatedly articulate themselves in a (genealogical, distanced, fractured, aggressive) relation to classical antiquity?

“Classical knowing” as a theme encouraged us to reflect on the location of knowledge – who owned it, who displayed it, who paraded it, what institutions formed it: was it in texts, in material objects, in music? Was it contingent or inherent, full of value or full of projections? What were the dynamics of knowing? The place of unofficial, private, emotional knowledge? In all these questions lurks an attitude to time. Is a scholar or artist simply “of their time” and if so what explanatory force does such placement provide? What is it to be fashionable or out of date where classical knowing is concerned? How does the notion of kairos as a classical value – judicious criticality – develop against such painful and fragmented nostalgia? Is all classical knowledge undermined by the loss of the past? Can the search for genealogical inheritance in antiquity do more than express a hankering belatedness? In asking how the past speaks to the present or the present appropriates the past we are asking a question about the (un)timeliness of knowing.

Friday 14 June

10:00
Welcome

10.20-11.30
Session I

Phiroze Vasunia
Response: Renaud Gagné

11.30-12.00
Coffee

12.00-13.10
Session II

Jim Porter
Response: Katherine Harloe

13.10-14.10
Lunch Break

14.10-15.20
Session III

Shane Butler
Response: Nick Hardy

15.20-15.50
Coffee

15.50-17.00
Session IV

Tim Whitmarsh
Response: Raphael Lyne

17.00-17.30
General Discussion

Saturday 15 June

09.00-10.10
Session V

Alastair Blanchard
Response: Kate Nichols

10.10-10.40
Coffee

10.40-11.50
Session VI

Simon Goldhill
Response: Scott Mandelbrote

11.50-13.00
Lunch

12.50-14.00
Session VII

Constanze Güthenke
Response: Joe Moshenska

14.00-14.30
Coffee

14.30-15.40
Session VIII

Miriam Leonard
Response: Theo Dunkelgrün

15.40-16.00
Break

16.00-17.00
Final Response by Ingo Gildenhard, and Discussion