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Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions by Peter Mack

Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions by Peter Mack Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/27/1/117/867418/0270117a.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 30 March 2022 Peter Mack, Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 255 pp. Reading Old Books offers readings of an eclectic selection of literary texts— Petrarch’s love poetry; Chaucer and Boccaccio; Ariosto, Tasso, and Spencer; Elizabeth Gaskell; Ngugi wa Thiong’o— loosely linked around the theme of tra- dition. The looseness of the link is evident not only in the surprise of going from the familiar national line of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto straight to Gaskell’s Mary Barton, but also in the rather strained claim that the plot of Mary Barton turns on the daughter’s not following a traditional female role, a quite different idea of tradition. The book’s introduction and conclusion deal more generally or theoretically with tradition but, while doing so, show inadequate awareness of how complex even the word tradition is, of how it can be manipulated for self- authorization, and of how it has become a source of such earnest contention in cultural studies. This book is resolutely literary in its focus, though its topic cries out for some study of institutions and their role in broader intellectual discourses, as well as for attention to the historicism and, more generally, the fascination with the past in the nineteenth century. It is another surprise, given Mack’s associa- tion with the Warburg Institute, not to see more here on the role of antiquity in defining tradition. Mack regards his book as a defense of literary tradition — and his writing, as always, is elegant and even eloquent. He ends with a “warily cau - tious optimism” about the continuing usefulness of tradition, but a harder- edged argument and a less insistently literary context would have made his claims more persuasive. — Simon Goldhill doi 10.1215/0961754X-8723213 Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 304 pp. From her title to her conclusion, Chaganti’s brilliantly graceful book circles between medieval and modern by means of dance. A book about form like no other, Strange Footing meditates not only on the impossibility of recovering dance from medieval poetry, but also on the impossibility of using modern dance to think about histories of representing and enacting dance. Undaunted by either challenge, Chaganti presents for our view two case studies juxtaposing medieval and modern. In the first, Lydgate’s fifteenth- century Danse Macabre is placed alongside Lucinda Childs’s Dance of 1979; the second seeks to reenact the elu- sive characteristics of medieval round dance through Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, L i t t l e R e v i e w s 117 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions by Peter Mack

Goldhill, Simon
Common Knowledge , Volume 27 (1) – Jan 1, 2021
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Copyright © 2021 Duke University Press
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0961-754X
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1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754x-8723213
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Abstract

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/27/1/117/867418/0270117a.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 30 March 2022 Peter Mack, Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 255 pp. Reading Old Books offers readings of an eclectic selection of literary texts— Petrarch’s love poetry; Chaucer and Boccaccio; Ariosto, Tasso, and Spencer; Elizabeth Gaskell; Ngugi wa Thiong’o— loosely linked around the theme of tra- dition. The looseness of the link is evident not only in the surprise of going from the familiar national line of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto straight to Gaskell’s Mary Barton, but also in the rather strained claim that the plot of Mary Barton turns on the daughter’s not following a traditional female role, a quite different idea of tradition. The book’s introduction and conclusion deal more generally or theoretically with tradition but, while doing so, show inadequate awareness of how complex even the word tradition is, of how it can be manipulated for self- authorization, and of how it has become a source of such earnest contention in cultural studies. This book is resolutely literary in its focus, though its topic cries out for some study of institutions and their role in broader intellectual discourses, as well as for attention to the historicism and, more generally, the fascination with the past in the nineteenth century. It is another surprise, given Mack’s associa- tion with the Warburg Institute, not to see more here on the role of antiquity in defining tradition. Mack regards his book as a defense of literary tradition — and his writing, as always, is elegant and even eloquent. He ends with a “warily cau - tious optimism” about the continuing usefulness of tradition, but a harder- edged argument and a less insistently literary context would have made his claims more persuasive. — Simon Goldhill doi 10.1215/0961754X-8723213 Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 304 pp. From her title to her conclusion, Chaganti’s brilliantly graceful book circles between medieval and modern by means of dance. A book about form like no other, Strange Footing meditates not only on the impossibility of recovering dance from medieval poetry, but also on the impossibility of using modern dance to think about histories of representing and enacting dance. Undaunted by either challenge, Chaganti presents for our view two case studies juxtaposing medieval and modern. In the first, Lydgate’s fifteenth- century Danse Macabre is placed alongside Lucinda Childs’s Dance of 1979; the second seeks to reenact the elu- sive characteristics of medieval round dance through Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, L i t t l e R e v i e w s 117

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Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2021

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