Voices - Harriet Fertik === [00:00:00] Harriet Fertik: What happens if reading a tradition that is implicated in violence against you is essential to understanding yourself and your place in the world? What do you do if that is the case? Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: I am very pleased to be joined today in the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio by Harriet Fertik, Associate Professor of Classics, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on literature and political thought in the early Roman Empire and on classical [00:01:00] reception, which is something I think we're gonna be diving into this afternoon. Dr. Fertik, welcome to Voices. Harriet Fertik: Thank you very much for having me. David Staley: Well, you know, before we get to the book project, maybe we start with a definition. When you say classical reception, to what does this refer? Harriet Fertik: Yeah, no, I think this is a great question. It's really the study, as I think of it, of how people in very different historical and cultural contexts have responded to, interpreted, understood, used Greek and Roman antiquity. And there are different ways of digging into what they have done with Greek and Roman antiquity. You can think about the particular histories, often complex and destructive for why people's in different time periods in different parts of the world have encountered the Greeks and Romans. You can think more broadly about what encounters with the Greek and Roman past mean for how people think about reading in a [00:02:00] broader sense , but I think that classical reception is a space generally where we think about, why are we still reading these very old texts? What do they mean? Do we have a choice about whether we continue to read them or not? And so, that is the area where I would think about classical fiction. David Staley: Is this a field, is this a sort of a recognized subfield or is this sort of your invention? Harriet Fertik: Oh, this is absolutely not my invention. It is a subfield, I would say it is a recognized subfield, but that it is increasingly common and prominent, particularly in the United States in recent years. When I was a graduate student, it was something that people were particularly in the state sort of starting to get interested in and had, there had been, you know, substantial work on it, but it wasn't something that students sort of coming to a PhD program were going to get into. This was going to be for a later phase of your scholarly career, and I [00:03:00] do think that is shifting to some degree. But part of what's happening is that places like Ohio State, and I would really say Ohio State Classics is one of the leading places in the country for classical reception at the moment. We just, in terms of the concentration of people we have working on it, places are putting resources into research, scholarship and curriculum that look at that, look at this field. So it is becoming more and more established and recognized, but there is a substantial history of work in it. David Staley: Hmm. Although recent, you say you were starting graduate school as this was, was emerging. Harriet Fertik: So, not as it as I would say it was emerging. I think we often date it and in fact a working group in the Humanities Institute here, that I am co-leading is working on this. We often date it to the early nineties. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Harriet Fertik: When there is a book published by Charles Martindale called _Redeeming the Text_, which looks at classical literature, particularly in his case, Latin literature , and looks at traditions of German [00:04:00] scholarship in reception and thinks about that, or builds on that as a way of reading classical texts. And by the time I was in graduate school, it's not that people hadn't been doing this, people had been working on it, but it was still, I think, quite marginal. And sometimes, for training in particular in the field, and to some degree also, I would say that it was sort of self-consciously, the place where you might do more sort of political work in the field, and that's where it would land, was in classical reception. And I think that growing interest in the politics of knowledge more generally in the humanities, makes a space for this, for this kind of work, even in, in fields like my own in classics where there is a very particular sense of the kinds of things you need to know to be a classicist or that you need to do to be a classicist. David Staley: Do these texts include like architecture? I'm thinking of, like, the building of Washington DC as, is very much influenced by classical forms. Is that [00:05:00] part of classical reception? Harriet Fertik: Yes, absolutely, and I think, going to that is, is exactly the kind of thing that we'd want to think about, would be looking not simply at literature and at texts, but also more broadly in which the visual world would be included as well. David Staley: Well, let's talk about your most recent project, _Traditions Lost and Found: W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Classical Antiquity_. I'm very interested to hear what you're arguing in this book. Harriet Fertik: Yeah, so the basic question of the book I would say is, what happens if reading a tradition that is implicated in violence against you is essential to understanding yourself and your place in the world? What do you do if that is the case? And that there are these two major thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, W. E. B. Du Bois, who lived from 1868 to 1963, and Hannah Arendt, who was 1906 to 1975, he is a major black American writer, sociologist, civil rights activist, and many other things. She was a German [00:06:00] Jewish refugee, essayist and political theorist, and they live really in the aftermath of these major events in sort of the history of western culture of slavery and the holocaust. And so, they belong to two of the groups that we might think of as having suffered the most from a Western tradition that traces itself back... David Staley: Mm-hmm. Harriet Fertik: To Greco-Roman antiquity. And for that reason, we might sort of expect them to give up on mm-hmm. Greek and Roman classics to abandon them, but in fact they repeatedly return to them and engage with them in their work. And this engagement can be critical, I wanna make that clear , but it's persistent. And the other thing that strikes me about the two of them is that these two thinkers share this interest, not just in ancient Greeks and Romans, but in German Jews and Black Americans. They think with the other. Sometimes, this is particularly famously in Arendt's case in very controversial and troubling ways, but they think about one another. They think about themselves, they think about [00:07:00] Greco-Roman antiquity to respond to the political questions that drive their work, and it's really tracing those relationships, that kind of triangle that I'm interested in in the book. David Staley: Yeah. Think how, how are they thinking about or thinking with classical antiquity? Harriet Fertik: Yeah. I think one of the examples, that I would turn to that is this famous passage from Du Bois's _Souls of Black Folk_. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Harriet Fertik: And this is actually in a lot of ways how I got into classical reception as a graduate student. I was teaching in a course, that was then called "Great Books". It was a freshman humanities course, and we read near the end of the year, Booker T. Washington's _Up From Slavery_. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Harriet Fertik: And what was quite, I think, fun about this for the students was that of course, much of that text he is trashing the kind of education they have spent the year pursuing, you know, humanities, literature, all of this kind of stuff. So, we read that, then we read some of Du Bois's responses, to Washington and to some of that thinking in [00:08:00] _The Souls of Black Folk_, where he offers this very energetic argument for liberal arts, humanities, and classics as part of a kind of preparation and education for citizenship. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Harriet Fertik: And he has this terrific passage in the book, where he talks about joining in conversation with Shakespeare, with Aristotle, with Aurelius, and with what soul, I will, he says, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension, and it's just a really striking image. And in some ways I've been sort of thinking about that moment in his work and what that means, ever since. David Staley: Tell us about the genesis of this project. In other words, why Du Bois and Hannah Arendt, why that duo? Harriet Fertik: Yeah. No, it's, that's a, it's a very valid question. Yes. So, I started working on Du Bois as a graduate student, really growing out of this experience when I was teaching, and I wound up being involved in projects. I [00:09:00] co-edited a journal issue on Du Bois's Classicism across his work. I was involved in co-founding and running a scholarly society, called Eos, which is dedicated to Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome. And so, that's sort of the Du Bois side of the project. I'd actually been working on Arendt or reading arendt, as part of the work I do on Roman literature and political thought. My first book is on Roman ideas about public and private, and generally how those ideas inform and sort of structure the concerns they have about power and the emergence of, of one man rule in the early Roman Empire. And Arendt is a famous thinker about public and private, right? And she uses, or refers to sort of her reading of Greco-Roman antiquity, repeatedly. So, I was digging into her work, as part of that project, and then at a certain point, a few years ago, I started to think about the sort of other [00:10:00] side or one of the other sides of Arendt's work, which is some of this very controversial writing that she does about American racial politics, in the 1950s. And I started to read more about the criticism of that line of Arendt's work, in fields mostly beyond classics, and to think about what that aspect of criticism of her work might mean for interest in Arendt by classicists like, like myself. And the more I started to, to think about that, I started to notice all of these connections between, Du Bois and Arendt in terms of their backgrounds, they both have experience In the German Academy, they study Greek and Roman antiquity growing up. They both occupy controversial positions in American life and with regards to the communities that they, that they come from. Du Bois writes or gives this speech in 1926, to a meeting of the NAACP, and this is during the period now of the Harlem Renaissance. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Harriet Fertik: And it's called [00:11:00] Criteria of Negro Art. And in the speech he talks about his experience as a young man going to this site. In Scotland, that is the site of Walter Scotts Lady of the Lake. And he has this sort of amazing experience communing with sort of the beauty of the place and thinking about the poem that he'd studied. And then all of these obnoxious white American tourists show up and they just kind of don't get it. And he's sort of reflecting on how he has this appreciation for beauty that is part of his experience of being a marginalized. Person in the society where he grew up and that they're connected, that that gives him some sort of aesthetic. Insight. And so that is one piece. And then some years later I read Hana ENTs 1944 essay. The Jew is Pariah Hidden Tradition and she makes some very similar points about how one thing that the Pariah Jew does, one response to this condition is [00:12:00] to seek out places of beauty. You know, cathedrals, palaces, things like this that sort of seem to. Come from the past where they might have been, you know confined in terms of access to particular people or you couldn't get in them. But now in their timelessness they seem sort of open and welcoming to everyone and that you have a greater appreciation for that. Be then full fledged members of society do. And I was really struck by what seemed to me between these two thinkers who are. Deployed very differently by scholars today who occupy very different sort of political spaces. Coming to I think a quite related insight about something that has to do with their own position and their own social position and their encounter with sort of the monuments of the culture that they're part of. David Staley: Do they ever engage each other directly? Harriet Fertik: Not directly. David Staley: I didn't think so. Harriet Fertik: My, to my [00:13:00] knowledge, yes. David Staley: So you've been, you've been talking about their similarities. Harriet Fertik: Yes. David Staley: What's different in their approach to classical antiquity? Harriet Fertik: Yes. So I've been focusing a lot on finding and thinking about these differences in the current in my current project, and one that I've come across very recently that I've been thinking through. Du Bois has this speech that he gives at Fisk University, which is a historically black university that he himself attended, and he is there in the early 1920s basically to attack the administration of the university for giving up on its commitment to liberal arts education. Turning towards vocational training or that's what he's worried is happening in any case. And also for in his view, accommodating itself to increasing segregation and Jim Crow in a way that he thinks is. You know, objectionable, that he wants students to sort of be prepared for reality, but [00:14:00] to not only be prepared for reality. And one thing that he does in this speech is he takes a speech of Cicero's the Roman orator Cicero in the first century, BCE. And this is a speech that Cicero gave in the Senate when Cesar. Was had already sort of achieved victory in these civil wars, and he's dictator at this at this time. And Cicero this is his first speech in the Senate after a period of, after a period of time, and he is thanking Caesar for Caesar's clemency. For Caesar's, pardon of one of his, of one of his enemies. The speech is called the Pro Marko on behalf of of Marcellus. And Du Bois takes this speech and he basically casts himself as Cicero as sort of the great wise thinker and statesman. He casts the administrators of Fisk as Caesar, and what he basically does, I think, is to make the students who are also present. [00:15:00] There into the Senators of Rome and to sort of identify them as the possibility for ongoing politics and the practice of citizenship, even in turn in very difficult circumstances. So he puts them in those roles, something that I've come across quite recently. Is when RN is writing about desegregation or efforts to desegregate schools. And this is one of her most controversial essays. It's called Reflections on Little Rock. It comes out in 1959. And this is an essay where she is arguing against desegregation of schools, or rather she's arguing against state intervention to do that. And she has an essay where she replies to her critics that comes out later that year. So there was a great criticism of this, of this essay in which she makes this comment that a hallmark [00:16:00] of political utopia since antiquity has been. Taking children sort of away from their parents so they can be, you know, educated in the ways that the ways of the future in an appropriate way for the future. And that this is a dangerous thing to do. And I think what she has in mind here is Plato's Republic. David Staley: Right. Harriet Fertik: Where this is something that , that is part of... David Staley: British public schools. Harriet Fertik: Yes. Yeah. And, but I think she is noting by saying, since antiquity, right? I think she is flagging this. And one thing that really strikes me as interesting is that the people that she's criticizing are the ones that she is. Associating with sort of Plato, Socrates and that sort of that that side. Whereas when Du Bois does it he is he's, he's, he, the way that he assigns people roles is a bit, is a bit different. And it's that sort of, that sort of split that I'm figuring out and thinking [00:17:00] through right now. David Staley: Hmm. That's, that's very interesting. I'm also interested to learn about your first book project, The Ruler’s House: Contesting Power and Privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome. What, tell us, what was the thesis? What findings may we discover in this book? Harriet Fertik: So, this is a book about how the Romans use the world of the house to interpret and interrogate the role of the emperor during the rise of one man rule in the first century CE during the Julio-Claudian period is how we refer to it today. David Staley: The house, the house, the structure, the house? Harriet Fertik: The house, the life that happens in the house, which is not exactly the same as what happens for us inside the house, the relationships that are there the people who live there. And the thing that I'm most interested in in that book is how Romans use the house to think about the contingency of their own and others' claims to power. Hmm. And the. [00:18:00] Dependency that the elite Roman man has on people who are in some way inferior to himself. So that might be the people that we refer to as his clients. Basically the crowd of people who are supposed to demonstrate that he's a big deal. They might be women. Who he needs for various things. They might be enslaved people, likewise. And I'm really interested in what it means for the elite Potter Famis, the elite head of the household to be dependent on and sort of vulnerable to these people who are inferior to him himself, and how these sort of dynamics inform Roman thinking on politics and power. And so that is what I explore in the book with a focus on this period of the development and entrenchment of one man rule. David Staley: Inform their thinking about this: say a, say a little more about this. It informs their, their sort of philosophical and legal thinking about these matters? Harriet Fertik: I think that's, I think that is, [00:19:00] yes, both of those are true. There is a work by the historian Tacitus that's called Dialogue on Orators. It's from the early second century ce and basically it is a group of, of men. Who get together in a curriculum, which is what we might call a bedroom, but it's not just for sleeping. It's really the space where if you're the head of the household, you have the people who are most important or allowed to sort of be there with you. And they're talking about the decline of oratory and what the reasons for that decline might be. And there are. No women in this text almost at all. They show up at one particular moment where one of the speakers is talking about how back in the day, Roman citizens were raised by their mothers and you had the esteemed. You know, grandmother of the household who was overseeing things. And now we just hand people over to little Greek slave girls to sort of deal with things. And so of course [00:20:00] that has an impact on our language and on our speech. And it's that kind of concern that actually I've been looking at in other. Other texts and other other, other Latin literature where you find concerns about earliest childhood and infancy. And the nurse in particular, enslaved nurses and mothers as very sensual to the idea of how we develop language and therefore as underpinning the kinds of. Language and literature we're going to grow up to produce. And it's that kind of worry. That is, that is interesting to me right now. David Staley: I'm interested in your methods. I guess how did you, how did you study this? I mean, are, are you looking at texts exclusively? Are you doing any work with archeology or architecture or material culture of the house? Harriet Fertik: Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So [00:21:00] in, in my book, I spend a fair amount of time with the material culture of the house. And one of the things that's difficult about this of course, is that there isn't just the house, right? There's a lot of different kinds of houses. And one of the advantages of dealing with material culture is looking. In a more complex, nuanced and varied way at what a house is and what domestic space is then you can sometimes get from a particular motivated, idealized picture in literary sources. And one thing that you learn from from studies of domestic. Archeology and Roman antiquity is that domestic spaces are just tremendously multifunctional. There's just a lot of things that are happening in these rooms. There might be a space where we talk about the atrium, and you might have we, we still, we still have these today, but Roman houses are supposed to be built around these courtyards. The atrium, and if you read certain kinds of literary sources, [00:22:00] you think that what happens in these. That the elite head of the household welcomes people. They are receives people. They're sort of his entourage. And that's one of the things that happens. But if you look at our evidence from Pompeii, from Italy, where we have a lot of examples of these, of these houses, and these are of course a very different sort of social and economic universe than the world of our literary texts. So that's one complicating factor as well. But you find a whole lot of loom weights, which are pieces of looms. That were used to weave cloth, and so then you have to ask yourself, what is this space for? Is it for. The pater, familias, the head of household to welcome his people. Is it for people to weave on alum and then you can think, well actually for Romans, these things might go together pretty well because you can have sort of the display of your sort of domestic traditional domestic virtue of weaving economic prosperity perhaps as [00:23:00] well that might be part of your display of. Political power and and distinction in in a different, in a different sphere. So there's different ways of thinking about what these sort of combinations of functions and activities do. But that is something that I would say we get from thinking about the material culture as well. David Staley: I suspect the Romans had a different idea about what privacy meant inside the house, different from ours. Harriet Fertik: I think that Romans are very sensitive to the fact that privacy is not necessarily something you want, you want to be seen, you want to be recognized at the same time, that's a vulnerable position to be in. And so you are going back and forth between these two between sort of these two, I would say competing values on the one hand, wanting a lot of attention and a lot of publicity. And on the other concern about wanting to control how [00:24:00] you appear to others. Hmm. And what happens is that the house is supposed to be the place where the elite householder has the most control over how he appears to others. He's not out, you know, in the public square where anything could happen. He's supposed to be able to sort of control the terms of the performance, but then you can think about is that really the case? What sort of, opportunities for undermining or complicating that picture. Might we find, if we looked at the perspectives of other, of other people who are present there. David Staley: A little earlier you mentioned this academic organization you helped found, Eos. Harriet Fertik: Yes. David Staley: Tell us a little bit more about this group. Harriet Fertik: Yes. So this is an organization, this is Eos. You can find our website, eosafricana.org. David Staley: And that's Eos, E-O-S. Harriet Fertik: E-O-S. Yes. Like the Greek word for dawn. Which is dedicated to a Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome. And it is a group of scholars, [00:25:00] classicists colleagues of mine at different, at different institutions, and our goal really is to create spaces for classicists to talk about the reception of classical antiquity. In from Africa, in Africa and across the African diaspora. And so we organize conference panels, we organize workshops. We have a series called Reads which we've been doing for many years, where basically we take a key text from Africana receptions. And work through that. And the idea is to give people the tools that they need, particularly classicists, to use this text in their research and teaching. So for example, a number of years ago we did a session on Tony Morrison's Unspeakable Things Unspoken. Mm-hmm. And the idea was to think about that in the context of classical reception and how we might how we might make this essay. Part of that scholarly discourse, and that's what the, [00:26:00] what the session was about. David Staley: Hmm. I'm curious to know how you ended up in classics. Why are you a classicist, say, and I don't know, not an historian or a physicist or a a, a tuba player; why, why classics? Harriet Fertik: I mean, what my, what my practical career path actually was going to be theater education. David Staley: Oh, very good. Harriet Fertik: For, for K through 12 students. So that was, yeah, that was my other, that was my other life. Yes. I like so many, I think in classics it was not it was not what I was intending to do. I took Latin when I got to college and I had a wonderful teacher for my first my first my first time reading where we were reading, we were reading Cicero, and that was wonderful. And then also my first year. I took my own sort of version of a great Books course. Where we read, one of the texts we read was Homer's Iliad. And I thought it was just so fascinating and wonderful that I really wanted to learn how to read Greek. And at that point it just [00:27:00] it just kept, it just kept going. David Staley: Hmm. Why'd you sign up for Latin your first semester of university? Harriet Fertik: I really did sign up for Latin because and this is maybe a good reminder to fellow colleagues. There was one of those language fairs where people had to sort of pitch their courses to incoming students. And really the person at the classics table was so much fun to talk to and talked about how, you know, wonderful. These courses were gonna be, that we were going to have this year. And I was, I was completely, I was completely sold on that. So it really is sort of a, a story of the, of the influence of teachers. Absolutely. David Staley: You mentioned earlier the working group that you co-lead. This is the metaphors of reception, reception is metaphor. This is a working group from the Humanities Institute here at Ohio State. Tell us about this. Tell us about this working group. Harriet Fertik: Yes. So this is we're really grateful and fortunate to have the support of the Humanities Institute for these working [00:28:00] groups which allow people from different departments to come together around a shared project. And this is one that I co-lead with my colleague in classics, Ben Flett Weinberg. And we also have on our, on our team Paul, writer and German and Jonathan Shilling in Italian. And the idea of the group is to look at the metaphors that are used to figure the relationship between texts and to think about the stakes of those metaphors. What does it do? If we think about the relationship between different texts as one of my colleagues does as sort of walking down a path, the Bard's path of song, what does that mean? What on the other hand happens? If we think about, and this is one that I'm interested in, we think about nursing. Language, which is something that we could think we, I find in, in Latin literary sources where the figure of the nurse becomes someone who is, or a figure that is [00:29:00] used to understand the transmission of, of language. David Staley: Hmm. Harriet Fertik: And so that's part of what we're doing. We're also thinking about reception as a metaphor. And this takes us back to classical reception. That the term reception, you know, what does, what does that mean? That it has, It is itself metaphorical and it comes ultimately from the Latin root for copio, which is capture or sees. And so we think about whether reception commits us to that kind of idea of relationship between text, some sort of idea of definitive possession and what the drawbacks of that might be? So we're really looking into a plurality of metaphors from Greco-Roman antiquity from the Italian Renaissance from the 19th century in, particularly in German literature. David Staley: Hmm. Harriet Fertik: And in post-colonial literatures as well as, as well as others. David Staley: Mm-hmm. So what are you working on now? I mean, once you finish the book project, what's, what's next on your agenda? What's next on your, for your research? Harriet Fertik: I really want [00:30:00] to spend more time with what women are doing in Roman ideas about the conceptualization of language and literature, and I've been very interested in what. A sphere in Roman life that is largely associated with men, whether that's the world of public speech, where we have some very limited examples of women who as public speakers or the world of writing. Well, we know there were some women who wrote, and we, we have a tiny bit and we have evidence attested for others. Niro's mother wrote memoirs that I am particularly sad that we, that we no longer, that we no longer have. But this is an overwhelmingly male dominated world we could say. Mm-hmm. And yet we get this recurrent theme of learning language being connected to. [00:31:00] The women who raise infants. So the the rhetorical teacher and theorist Quintilian is very concerned in the early book of his works about thinking about what kind of language your baby, Roman citizen is going to be exposed to. And that means, you know, what kind of language his nurses, for example, are going to use. And I'm very interested in thinking about what it means that this literary tradition in which women's voices are problematic or absent, whatever it, whatever it may be. What it means that they're there at the origins of Roman thinking or the Roman thinking about the origins of language. David Staley: Mm. Harriet Fertik, thank you. Harriet Fertik: Thank you very much. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. [00:32:00] Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.