Goodwin
Award Citation for
Kathleen McCarthy
(The Charles J. Goodwin Award of
Merit, named in honor of a long-time member and generous
benefactor of the American Philological Association, is
the only honor for scholarly achievement given by the
Association.)
The Goodwin committee unanimously
recommends that this year's prize be awarded to Kathleen
McCarthy for her book Slaves, Masters and the Art of
Authority in Plautine Comedy, published by Princeton
University Press in 2000. In a year in which a number of
outstanding candidates were proposed and examined, it was
above all McCarthy's lucid, subtle, and elegant study
that most deeply impressed all three members of the
committee.
McCarthy begins by asking just why
it was that Roman audiences found Plautus so funny -- a
question which some might dismiss as too trivial to be
worth posing, yet one that is in fact so fundamental and
so deeply unsettling that it needs to be re-asked in
every generation. Her own answer is that just as those
Roman audiences were politically and ideologically
diverse, so too the Plautine comedies that appealed so
much to them had to satisfy fully very disparate kinds of
psychological and cultural needs. Thus the divisions
within Roman society between more and less conservative
segments are mirrored within Plautus' texts by a division
between two kinds of comedy: a more naturalistic,
socially conservative mode, and a more farcical,
potentially disruptive one. The genius of Plautus lies in
part in his extraordinary ability to play off these modes
against one another in such a way that no part of his
audience feels excluded and that all can laugh together,
at his play, at one another, and at themselves.
McCarthy's book proposes a single
fundamental interpretative hypothesis based upon a clear
and interesting idea and follows it through with a grace
that prevents her determination from seeming relentless
and with a seriousness that lends compelling substance to
her literary intuitions. She makes an important
contribution to Plautine studies, moving beyond the
traditional search for traces within Plautus' comedies of
the differences between his Greek models and his own
transformations of them, and redirecting attention to
those more subtle forms of interplay of stimulus and
response between author and audience which are
characteristic for the dramatic genres in all times and
places. Indeed, the interest of her book goes well beyond
even Plautus and archaic Roman comedy, important as we
expect her reinvigoration of studies in this area to
prove over the coming years: what is more, her emphasis
on the diversity of theatrical audiences will be of
importance for studies of drama in other cultures, while
her analysis of types of comedy is an important and
original contribution to the theory of the comic. Besides
all this, she reads Plautus closely and well and has
familiarized herself with a variety of literary theories
but has not been suffocated by her knowledge of them. And
above all, she sure knows how to write.
McCarthy's book has all the
traditional virtues of socially aware literary criticism
in the field of Classics. It integrates literary
concerns, such as plot construction, variants on comic
types, and linguistic play, with a commitment to broader
social functions and meanings in a way that is enriching
rather than reductive. At the same time, it also
formulates convincingly our own very contemporary sense
of the irreducible diversity both of our lives and of the
books that we treasure. As such, it deserves the Goodwin
Prize for 2002 and we recommend it enthusiastically.