Abstract
This lecture is a reflection on the often random processes by which the great literature of the classical past has been preserved for the present - and a reflection too on the fact that most of the great classics have not in fact survived. The question of the survival of texts opens up to a wider inquiry into what literature itself preserves, and what literature is for: the often accidental survival of the "classics" raises important questions about how literary canons are formed, and how literary reputations are forged. (Of the nine volumes of Sappho catalogued in the Library of Alexandria, precisely two poems remain; and yet Sappho is "canonical") Towards the end of his lecture, Daniel Mendelsohn links these thoughts to a more recent (and personal) story whose themes are cultural ambition in the face of annihilation: the story he heard, while researching for his "The Disappeared", from a Holocaust survivor who recounted to him the story of the first thing that happened after the end of the war in Poland: a production of "Antigone".
