(From BMCR 00.10.20)Thomas on Van Sickle
on Meban & Kuipers on Thomas & Hubbard
Word count: 232
This seems pretty pathetic to me. Under the guise of an enquiry about"scholarly
erasure" forsooth, to which we are all subject, Van Sickle (BMCR00.10.01)[[1]]
claims that David Meban's (obviously excellent) review of my intertextual
Virgil Kleine Schriften (Reading Virgil and his Texts, Michigan 1999) failed
to note my erasing of him (Van Sickle) by failing torefer to the abstract
of a talk he apparently gave a quarter of a centuryago at the 1976 APA
in New York City, published, qua abstract, in LCM 2(1977) 107-8, a document
"now" on the Web, at <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/jvsickle/bb6midst.htm>.
In thechapter of my book in question, "Voice, Poetics, and Virgil's SixthEclogue"
(orig. article 1998) I had discussed inter al. the possibilitythat the
"errors" in mythology, etc. in Ecl. 6 might be attributable to thefact
that the narrator is "Tityrus" (who doesn't know epic and drama, thesites
of his "errors") rather than Virgil, or even "Virgil", and hadsuggested,
inter al., that editions of the poem should acknowledge (as nonehas) that
the primary narrator (unlike that of Ecl. 4 and 10, e.g.) needsto be identified
with someone other than Virgil. I strongly urge all bmcrreaders to buy
my book immediately (it can be ordered at <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0472108972
/instrvmentvmlitt > ), read my chapter, and then go on line and decide
whether I should have referred to Van Sickle's 1976 APA abstract.
Richard F. Thomas
Department of the Classics
Harvard University
rthomas@fas.harvard.edu
NOTES[[1]] BMCR neglected to identify the author fully: John
Van Sickle,Department of Classics, Brooklyn College; jvsickle@brooklyn.cuny.edu