|
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
A Special Collections exhibition titled "The Classic Tect: Traditions and Interpretations" was on view from May 1996 through March 1997, and has been reconstituted as this online exhibit...
These are some of the questions addressed by a major exhibition entitled "The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations," that was on view in the Fourth Floor Exhibition Gallery of the Golda Meir Library from May 1996 through March 1997. This exhibit was redesigned as a Web exhibit in 1997. The exhibition of over 130 books, manuscripts, and prints, drawn principally from the library's Special Collections, is concerned less with the literary merits of the great standard classics, than it is with the text as cultural icon, offering insight into the question of what becomes a classic most, and why. The establishment of the Great Books Program at UWM is the most recent affirmation that certain works in the western tradition have moved far beyond their original literary intent, becoming symbols of cultural identification and reliquaries of the collective western consciousness. The exhibition examines some of the high spots of the western literary canon. It explores the foundations of their iconographic standing, demonstrating how they arrive at this status through a variety of means, and not always on the basis of their literary worth. The exhibition gives special focus to how printers, publishers, editors, illustrators, and translators have used the icon of the classic text as a venue for their own agendas. Represented in the exhibit are ancient texts, from the Bible to the works of Greek and Roman writers, such as Homer, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Ovid; the work of medieval and early renaissance authors, such as St. Augustine, Dante, and Chaucer; titles from the early modern period such as the works of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, and John Milton's Paradise Lost; and works from later modern authors, including James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and James Joyce's Ulysses.
"The Classic Text" is the work of many hands. Under the curatorial direction of Special Collections Librarian Max Yela, the exhibition was researched and prepared by Special Collections interns: Christopher Barth (classical literature, St. Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton), a graduate student in the Department of History and the School of Library and Information Science, and Sarah McDaniel (the Bible, Cooper, Stowe, Hawthorne, and Joyce), a graduate student in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature and the School of Library and Information Science. The section on William Shakespeare was prepared by Dr. Virginia Haas of UWM's Department of English and Comparative Literature, and Senior Editor for the New Variorum Shakespeare project based at the Golda Meir Library.
|
|
-
-
-
|
In what ways have such classic works as the Bible and the plays of
William Shakespeare been presented to a loyal readership over the centuries? How have the
works of the ancient Greeks and Romans been transmitted through the millennia, and why do they
continue to hold such potency and relevance? How has the vivid imagery of Dante's Divine
Comedy been depicted and interpreted from the middle ages to the present? Would
Milton's Paradise Lost have entered the canon of western literature without the
untiring promotional efforts of its principal publisher? Why do works such as Cooper's The
Last of the Mohicans and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin continue to hold secure positions
as American literary classics? Would James Joyce's Ulysses have remained an obscure
modernist novel without the censorship issues that surrounded it?
