From the Editor: Foucault and Arethusa

• Published in: Arethusa 2023-09, Vol.56 (3), p.255-261
• Main Author: Woodard, Roger D
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Art galleries & museums; Classical literature; Classical studies; French language; French literature; Greek civilization; Literature; Philology; Politics; Public speaking; Reported speech; Semiotics; Sophocles (496?-406 BC)
• ISSN: 0004-0975; 1080-6504; 1080-6504
• DOI: 10.1353/are.2023.a917337

In March and April of 1970, Foucault lectured in Buffalo—at the university, but also at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum)—a lecture simply entitled "Edouard Manet. The 1972 visit of Foucault to Buffalo corresponds chronologically with the succession of J. P. Sullivan to the editorship of Arethusa and with the appearance of the journal's very first special thematic issue, entitled Politics and Art in Augustan Literature, with Sullivan himself providing one of the contributions, "The Politics of Elegy." The political dimension of the issue (and, for that matter, the art dimension) cannot be attributed directly to any influence from Foucault's presence in Buffalo it seems; indeed, the issue had taken shape out of a set of papers presented at a UB symposium on Augustan literature in 1969. Carl A. Rubino begins his article, "Lectio Difficilior Praeferenda Est: Some Remarks on Contemporary French Thought and the Study of Classical Literature," with a long (and by now well-rehearsed) quotation from The Order of Things, the 1970 English translation of Foucault's Les Mots et les choses (1966), in which Foucault distances his work from the label of "structuralism," while Vincent Farenga ("Violent Structure: The Writing of Pindar's Olympian 1") references work of Derrida that appears in a 1968 collection to which Foucault contributed the first chapter and by whose name the work is conventionally cited (Foucault et al. 1968).