European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance Barbara Simerka (bio) European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Edited by Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. x + 366 pp. $65.00. Patrick Cheney and Frederick de Armas have created an anthology which seeks to create the theoretical approach that it practices, "career criticism." They ground this endeavor in studies by Lawrence Lipking (1981), Richard Helgerson (1983), and Leo Braudy (1986) which analyze authors from Virgil to Rilke whose writings express a "self-conscious sense of vocation or destiny" and foreground the "process of self-presentation" as a poet laureate (5). Over the past twenty years, scholars of European literature have used the career studies paradigm primarily for analysis of Spenser's oeuvre; the contributors to this volume greatly expand the field of study as they trace modalities of careerism from Classical authors to the seventeenth century. The introduction also cites Louis Montrose's musings on career criticism as a form of a post-Foucauldian study of authorship: not a return to intentionality studies, but a historically and culturally grounded analysis of the "author function" (21). The anthology presents its studies in chronological order, beginning with Joseph Farrell's exploration of Greek and Roman careerism. Farrell delineates an Athenian model in which writers practiced a single genre and presented themselves as experts in and defenders of that particular kind, and the shift to the Virgilian "triad" model of authors who "evolve" from eclogues through georigics to the epic pinnacle. This sequence formalizes the notion of generic hierarchy, in which the epic reigns over lesser genres, and thus is the crowning achievement of the mature poet. Farrell also explores the emergence of the poet laureate as a public citizen whose career path is similar to and as important to the Republic as that of the senator or consul. This opening study establishes clear connections between specific socio-political circumstances and the public function of the career author which are echoed in many of the later essays. The next three essays demonstrate that the Virgilian triad is not the sole model for authors who consciously craft a public persona. Mark Vessey elucidates the development of an alternate, Christian careerism, first outlined by Braudy in his analysis of Augustine's Confessions and other spiritual writings. This early Christian cursus, just as self-aware as the pagan path, [End Page 191] emphasizes the conversion narrative and the autobiography of spiritual development, as well as emphasis upon the poet as the humble recipient of divine illumination. In studying Jerome's vast output, Vessey also identifies the bibliography of previous Christian writers as an important element, creating an alternative history of forefathers. This is a tactic that scholars have also noted among women and other writers from marginalized groups who seek to legitimate their claims to authority. Vessey also explores the actual process of writing, as commemorated in visual representation: from late antiquity through the fourteenth century, authors are depicted with completed works at hand, for composition was conceived of as a process in which the author, inspired by pagan muse or Christian deity, dictated his words to a scribe. Vessey does not indicate any sort of cultural anxiety concerning the separation of authorizing voice and inscribing hand; further scrutiny of this model of writing could enhance the current recuperation of texts dictated by illiterate mystical authors to their confessors in the early modern period. Robert B. Edwards stretches the notion of career criticism to its limits in his analysis of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Boccaccio. Edwards characterizes their Theban texts as far more indirect, ignoring the model of self-conscious and self-advertised progression through genres. Instead, Edwards asserts, they employ "invention" in order to reinscribe classical sources as well as each other's texts. This essay dances at the boundaries of career criticism, revealing its intersection with the study of intertextuality. James Burke provides a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the dynamics of indirect careerism in his study of medieval Spanish authors. He identifies the "invention" model and also the Christian trope of authorial humility as forms of patriarchy that impede...

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