Dominik, 'Dominik on Dewar on Dominik', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9503
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9503-dominik-dominik

@@@@95.3.19, RESPONSE:  Dominik on Dewar on Dominik

Response:  Dominik on Dewar on Dominik (<i>BMCR</i> 94.9.8)

     Michael Dewar's review of my Speech and Rhetoric in Statius'
<i>Thebaid</i> was disappointing.  What Dewar does, especially in
the second half of his review, is to pick holes wherever he
thinks he possibly can.  It is not for me to review my own book,
but it seems to me that as a result of his predominantly negative
approach he misses the contribution that it makes to the field of
Statian studies in the areas of rhetoric and critical
interpretation.  For instance, he barely mentions the second
chapter, which discusses the role of the speeches in the
narrative strategy; to my knowledge, no other previously
published book or article demonstrates how understanding the
interactive relationship and ongoing dialectic between speech and
narrative is crucial to appreciating the thematic and dramatic
tensions of the <i>Thebaid</i>.  Furthermore, Dewar distorts some
of my arguments, for example, when he suggests that I see the
'human characters of the poem . . . as <i>little more than</i>
helpless victims of malicious supernatural beings' (my emphasis). 
As for Dewar's subjective comments on the length of my book, its
style and diction, they reveal more about his own scholarly
idiosyncrasies than they say about the substantive issues of the
book.  While Dewar considers my study excessively long and does
not like my style, his comments on my 'inventival fecundity'
(i.e., lexical creativity) are a boorish attempt at cleverness. 
He also exaggerates the number and significance of the
copy-editing errors, which he seems to take as much interest in
as the importance of the ideas presented.

     Some readers will be aware that in <i>Scholia</i> 2 (1993) I
reviewed Dewar's fine philological commentary of <i>Thebaid</i> 9
(Oxford 1991).  Perhaps Dewar took exception to my pointing out
that his commentary does not 'tell us much what the
<i>Thebaid</i> is <i>about</i>' (p. 130), since he tries to show
that some of my ideas, which are very different from the orthodox
views presented in the introduction to his commentary and in his
reviews, are really not all that novel (even if they are not made
by any other Statian scholar).  I believe that the <i>Thebaid</i>
has been generally misinterpreted by modern scholars, including
Dewar, and my recently published <i>The Mythic Voice of Statius:
Power and Politics in the Thebaid</i> (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1994)
attempts to demonstrate this by expanding upon the ideas
presented in <i>Speech and Rhetoric in Statius' Thebaid</i>.

     While Dewar does have a number of favourable things to say
about <i>Speech and Rhetoric in Statius' Thebaid</i> in the first
half of his review, he generally seems more interested in showing
off his own cleverness than in objectively appraising what is
valuable in the book.  I can only hope the other reviewers of my
book demonstrate a more constructive and informed approach to the
writing of reviews.