Apuleius and the Classical Canon

I begin with the question, “Is Apuleius a canonical author?” Any answer that one might give would of course raise other questions; and in the context of this volume, the most important of these would be whether Apuleius’ African origin enters into it. But before confronting that question, I have to address a few others that are more basic. For one can hardly get started on this problem until asking, what is the canon and what forces govern its formation? Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Classics Comments These remarks were delivered at "Apuleius and Africa: An International Classics Conference," which took place at Oberlin College on April 29–May 2, 2010. This presentation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/129 Apuleius and the Classical Canon Joseph Farrell, University of Pennsylvania I begin with the question, “Is Apuleius a canonical author?” Any answer that one might give would of course raise other questions; and in the context of this volume, the most important of these would be whether Apuleius’ African origin enters into it. But before confronting that question, I have to address a few others that are more basic. For one can hardly get started on this problem until asking, what is the canon and what forces govern its formation? My inclination is to approach these questions practically as well as historically. During the “culture wars” of the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, the questions of what did or didn’t belong in the canon of western literature, why it did or didn’t belong, and whether there should even be such a canon and what legitimate purpose it might serve, were all hotly debated. It would be difficult to maintain that the matter was ever officially settled; but one result of that turmoil has been a greater openness to difference in the popular and professional evaluation of literature. Within the academy as a whole there is no question but that the range of authors taught and studied as literature is much larger than it was until thirty or even perhaps twenty years ago. And within Classical Studies specifically, where the amount of literature that survives from Greek and especially Roman antiquity is so small, there has nevertheless been a noticeable increase in the number of works that scholars study more or less for their own sake instead of for secondary purposes. But breadth of general interest may not tell us much about how the profession actually defines the canon; and if that is what interests us, then our inquiry more or less reduces to the mundane question of whether a writer’s name appears on graduate school reading lists. 1 For a convenient survey of these debates see Star 2002. 2 Although it has to be said that the recent expansion of interest in texts that were formerly little read is in large part due to a significant shift in what constitutes literary study away from belle lettres in the direction of social and cultural history.