Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Well before the inventions of the postmodernists in the 1960s and 1970s, the classical component in Western culture had already been subjected by others to radical revisions that might have stimulated interest among artists. The old academic vision of the classics had been undermined and new meanings and values anticipated by powerful appropriations. Artists developed a whole range of responses to the classics, from the most immediate and idiosyncratic to those more typical of ideas, which became widely diffused, that were suggested (mediated if not dictated) by the cultural authority of others, proposed elsewhere and solidified into currency as compelling cultural myths – above all by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, along with disciples of Freud such as Otto Rank and Carl Jung. Another key source of classical influence on artists is The Golden Bough (1922) by Sir James G. Frazer.Nietzsche himself was a classicist, but too speculative and bold for most scholars. He burst the limits of academic discipline in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), which confidently posited a dynamic of Greek culture in terms of opposing tendencies of the human psyche, the Apollonian and Dionysian. The dichotomy proved unforgettable. It was to acquire mythic status in modern culture, all the while remaining controversial and problematic, especially among the classicists of his ... log in or subscribe to read full text