Mary Beard Keeps History on the Move

'For Beard, change has always been a part of the classics. We need to expose the field’s flaws to learn how we’ve inherited them.'

Katy Waldman interviewed classicist and historian Mary Beard at The New Yorker.

[Waldman] "How do you feel about canons? As a proposition.

[Beard] "They’re always changing, aren’t they? And what’s almost more important than what’s in them is the dialectical element: they’re what you react against. I know I sound like a tricksy academic, but in some ways a canon reveals to you not so much what is there as what’s not there. And so it changes itself; it’s self-destructive. The problem, of course, is that we can’t read everything, and so we have to be aware of what we are and aren’t reading, and why we are or aren’t reading it.

"Obviously, there is conservative support for a particular version of the canon, and I think we all know what that looks like. But if you think about some of these apparently conservative institutions more radically, coming face-to-face with them makes you question what you ought to read. And so I think that paradoxically, although it’s easy to get upset about the dead hand of the canon, all the dead white men of literature, et cetera, I also, looking back, can start to say, 'But that’s the canon doing its job.' It’s making me ask, 'Why is it like this?'"