Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (1946; trans. 1953)

Abstract

This article nominates Bruno Snell’s Discovery of the Mind (1946; trans. 1953) as an Undead Text on the basis of three criteria. The article examines first the persistence of a Snellian story about the Greeks as the ancestors of modern Europe within the discipline of classics, before considering the broader question of how Undead Texts interact with Undead (Grand) Narratives. It then considers Discovery as an Undead Narrative in its symbiotic relationship with E. R. Dodds’s Greeks and the Irrational, which remains a standard-bearer of the narrative of the Greeks as Other to the moderns. In its final analysis, the article looks to Discovery as itself a perennially productive site for plotting the coordinates of Same and Other in relationship to the ancient Greeks, arguing that such questions are as much about enabling new attachments to the “classical” past as they are about conservative claims of heritage or, conversely, estrangement from the present.