Scholars, help me out with this. How long do you consider scholarly work to remain viable? How long before it’s “out of date” — doomed to the dustbin of scholarship by newer scholarly ideas or methods?

A commentater on one of my recent posts chastised me for referring readers to H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks, originally published 58 years ago. She (I assume it was a she) scorned something written more than 50 years ago, wishing instead I’d referred to “a more recent work that takes account of advances in feminist theory and readings of history.” The comment reminded me of the wonderful British comedian Eddie Izzard saying — with exaggerated shock — in a routine about American tourists with a shallow sense of history marveling at the age of Art Deco buildings in Miami Beach: “Over 50 years ago! My God, no one was alive back then!”

It didn’t matter to the commentater that Kitto, in that oh-so-long-ago year ago of 1951 when Neanderthals roamed the earth, possessed an unequalled grasp of the Greek language and its history, ancient Greek political and social organization, and the Greeks’ literary and philosophical lives. And no matter, too, that Kitto also employed a deeply subtle approach to his subject — infused with passionate attachment to the Greeks that was carefully modified by a keen, critical modernism. And no matter that The Greeks (a book for generalists, to be sure; but he also wrote several others that were densely scholarly) was, for a couple of generations at least, a standard introductory text for anyone studying the ancient Greeks. No matter any of that. To the commenter, my referring to Kitto was yet another obeisance to another dead white male’s antiquated scholarship which was uninformed by “more recent work that takes account of advances in feminist theory and readings in history.” [Emphasis mine]

Before I became an artist, I had a pretty good liberal-arts education (the old-fashioned kind, when you could be smart, work your butt off in a course, and still receive a grade of “C”), and at a women’s college at a time when feminism was a red-hot front-burner issue. I was a feminist then and I’m a feminist now; what I’ve done with my life is living proof of it. But among other invaluable things I learned during my undergraduate years was that great scholarly work shouldn’t automatically be trashed just because other interpretations (and usually lesser ones — midgets standing on the shoulders of giants and all that) come along.

Who in her right mind seriously thinks that an idea of “progress” lifted from technology and industry (e.g., a 2009 model television set is better than a 1951 model) is unerringly applicable in the humanities? Do we, for instance, toss out Nicolas Niccoli because the Florentine humanist was hopelessly old-fashioned because he was obsessed with orthography? How about Tony Tanner (who died in 1998), whose acute studies of the work of Jane Austen, among others, failed to take account of “advances in feminist theory and readings in history”?

Until now (and, despite great gains in inclusiveness, even now), most of the art in Western culture was made by male artists who were (surprise!) ignorant of “advances in feminist theory.” Their art was often a result of their ecstatic male gaze on the mostly passive female form. Or, to take an example of art that was prominent right around the time Kitto’s book was published, there’s Abstract Expressionism. Save for a few excellent painters such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, we’re talking paintings that came about because of male psyches — tortured by all kinds of macho misguidance, deformed by hard drinking, and propelled by testosterone. So I’m supposed to disregard the art — and any art-historical and critical writing that says it’s any good — because it isn’t informed by, say, Tracy Emin’s “recent advances” in feminist aesthetics?

Sorry, but unlike the claims on detergent boxes, “new” scholarship does not automatically mean “improved.” And schools of cultural historians don’t always trump previous ones, especially if the card they play is slavish adherence to a doctrinaire branch of a general movement such as feminism. The best anyone — artists, writers, historians, even scientists — can hope for is to grasp partial, incomplete pictures of the whole. And in this situation, individual brilliance (some scholars have it, some don’t) is more valuable to readers than up-to-date intellectual fashion.

Kitto did have his limitations — for example, his infatuation with Greek individualism and obsession with freedom spilled over into some pretty silly comments about left-leaning politics in the Britain of his time — but his interpretation of the Greeks was brilliant when he first offered it to us, and it remains brilliant today.