Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal - Softcover

Knox, Bernard M. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393331172 ISBN 13: 9780393331172

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994

Synopsis

"Prospective readers puzzled by the somewhat enigmatic title Backing into the Future may well come to the conclusion that it is a reference to the amusing film produced in 1985, called Back to the Future. But in fact the source of the title is much older. The phrase is based on a number of expressions found in ancient Greek literary texts: the chorus's description of its bewilderment in Sophocles's Oedipus the King, for example -- 'not seeing what is here nor what is behind' -- or the characterization of an older man in Homer's Odyssey as 'the one who sees what is in front and what is behind.' The natural reaction of the modern reader is to understand the first of these expressions as 'not seeing the present nor the past,' and the second as 'who sees the future and the past.' But the Greek word opiso, which means literally 'behind' or 'back,' refers not to the past but to the future. The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us – we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us. Only a few very wise men can see what is behind them; some of these men, like the blind prophet Tiresias, have been given this privilege by the gods. The rest of us, though we have our eyes, are walking blind, backwards into the future." --from the Foreword

About this title

About the Author

Bernard Knox is director emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC.

From Kirkus Reviews

Essays, articles, and reviews from the past few years by scholar and classicist Knox (The Oldest Dead White European Males, 1993, etc.). The ancients, Knox remarks, thought of themselves as looking into the past, which was visible, and as standing with their backs to the future, which was invisible for not yet existing. How this intriguing idea (people seem to have turned around sometime in the Middle Ages) manifests itself in the present volume may not be fully clear, although it's true that one does come away with an awakened sense of the past, if not always a highly excited one. Essays on Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Catullus, and Ovid--often the reviews of books on these figures--have less lift for the nonspecialist than they might have had at their first publication (in Grand Street, for example, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books). A speech made on the subject of democracy's first origins, however (``The Athenian Century''), is full both of fact and fascination, as is a review of I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates; but a long review, on the other hand, of an academic book on Plato and Aristotle (``How Should We Live'') is unremittingly demanding, and a long essay on Sophocles is touched by Lethe. These pieces, though, have different characters just as they had different origins, and an essay on T.E. Lawrence's Odyssey is filled with interest, as are essays on the present status of philology (constituting a grand call to arms for humanities teaching), on historical American views of Rome, and a lyrically celebratory review, from a classicist commanding the entire long tradition, of Derek Walcott's Omeros. Not all things to all readers, but a varied pasture for literate browsers. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0393331172
• ISBN 13: 9780393331172
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356