A new PhD experiences a number of crises upon graduation. From publication to job market searches and interviews to what to do with the dissertation. While these things have certainly occupied my mind in the last few months, I choose to think about something else, a kind of avoidance of these other things, I’m sure. And even as I’ve experienced these crises at different points recently, the one that is most consuming is a crisis of identity. What does it mean to be a Latinist teaching Rhetoric in an English department? In short, it means that I have a job, in a difficult and, at times, disheartening job market. It means I have a job in my field of expertise, something that I have always been proud of since I graduated from Mount Holyoke. My goal, however, is to maintain an interdisciplinary professional identity, and so, I must figure out how to go about creating that identity.
The question: how do I keep up with Latin after the PhD in Rhetoric and Composition? It is, I think, an issue of ethos. By writing about ancient rhetorics, classical rhetorics, and translation, by translating authors like Cicero myself, I hope to combine these things – my love of the Latin language and literature, with a critical approach to literature and translation and ancient culture and a pedagogical (and critical) approach to the language that makes it relevant to the twenty-first century. It is also a practical question: if I do not use the language regularly, then I lose it, so how do I keep from losing it? If nothing else, learning a language taught me a great deal of commitment and discipline. It has also shown me that a little everyday is the best approach for me in most things in life. It is deeply important to me to keep up my language skills, especially when I struggled so much to hone those skills in the first place. It is a practical question, although, I’m sure not everyone will see it that way because ancient languages are usually labeled as “dead.”
Perhaps this post and this journey is only for me. Perhaps the message might resonate with others. The audience of people who might relate to this specific phenomenon, I suppose, is quite small. Even writing on this blog, in the wide world of the web, I can imagine this small and quiet corner where a task such as this is important. Latin, to me, has never been only about the language, but so much more. And now it’s time to turn to the skills that this specific learning and teaching has left with me, and how I might continue to use and engage with them still.
Maybe this journey resonates with a broader audience, one who sees value in the interdisciplinary nature of these very fields. As I embark on this new chapter, I want to reflect on the need that I have to justify what I’m doing, to justify the way that I am combining my work in rhetoric and language study, the way that transfer theory works with Latin and ancient languages. Ultimately I make a case for an interdisciplinary professional identity: that I can be someone who exists between Rhetoric and Composition and Classics.
So. What am I doing? I’m committing to reading some Latin everyday. There are Latin novellas, written for readers much below my level, but these are fun to read, and do important work of retelling stories and engaging new (and young) audiences. There’s Hans Orberg. There are many women Latinists that I am eager to read, starting with Isotta Nogarola and Perpetua, because I found new commentaries of their writing. There’s the work of Project Nota, that I keep up with via Facebook posts. There are translations that urge me to return to source texts. There is the desire to translate some Latin text myself, and so I am searching for something that I feel connected to and want to work on. I also plan on writing about the different reasons for studying Latin that are not just about the language, although the language is crucial, but that also explains why translations, retellings, critical approaches to the ancient mediterranean cultures and literatures, and the need for a rhetorical approach to ancient language study are necessary and important. I hope that these reflections will help to contribute to the creation of my own interdisciplinary identity.
Alexandra Sladky 