'Classics' for an Age of Anxiety Gardner, Hunter
The Classical journal (Classical Association of the Middle West and South),
12/2022, Letnik:
118, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a year when finding time for service outside the parameters of our home institutions has been particularly challenging, I've been relieved and heartened by your willingness to step in and serve. ...Ayelet Lushkov's article, originally published in the LA Review of Books and recirculated in the blog Pasts Imperfectpoints to recent novels, Alex Michaelides' The Maidens (2021) and Mark Prins' The Latinist (2022) as reinforcing the more sinister connotations of "Classics" in popular culture. ...I'm going to start with a passing reference to one treatment of an ancient plague and then move on to what I hope we'll find in ancient authors: a way to address the more general circumstances in which we find ourselves, that is, an age of increased anxiety, both regarding our individual circumstances and our goals, fears, and desires, as a community. Social, economic, and family life have all been destabilized; planning the most mundane home renovations can become an exercise in frustration when a supply chain is backed up; planning a conference when we're not certain when the next disease variant will emerge and how many individual speakers it will impact is the stuff of nightmares-and I'm not being figurative here.
This essay examines the way that plague discourse allows two writers, Ovid and Mary Shelley, to contemplate the power of a revolution to transform a civic body. The author focuses initially on Ovid’s ...rendering of plague on Aegina in Metamorphoses 7, contextualizing it as a response to the changing significance of pietas as well as to the succession crisis faced by the Principate in the 20’s BCE; she interprets King Aeacus’ narrative of the tragedy he witnesses among his people and their replacement by Myrmidons (ant-people) as a cynical response to the Augustan revolution and its ability to implement lasting change in how Roman subjects interact after the prolonged civil wars of the late Roman Republic. The author then turns to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in which a plague eradicates all of known humanity except for a single survivor and eye-witness, Lionel Verney. The essay demonstrates that Shelley taps into Ovid’s cynicism regarding the potential for human recovery after widespread devastation as she and her protagonist consider various alternatives for effective governance in England. Shelley’s exploration of the affective bonds born from familial ties (Ovidian pietas) suggest that such ties pose insurmountable problems to implementing permanent transformation within any human social order.
This project examines how and why time is gendered in Latin love elegy, so that it appears to affect men and women differently. Drawing on recent efforts to situate the elegies of Propertius, ...Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu, the book considers the genre’s brief flowering during the Augustan Principate. Part one argues that imperatives of the new regime, encouraging a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government, put temporal pressures on the elite male that shape the amator’s (or “poet-lover’s”) resistance to entering a course of civil service and prompt his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved. Part two of the book examines the divergent temporal experiences of the amator and his beloved puella (“girl”) through the lens of “women’s time” (le temps des femmes) and the chora as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s model of feminine subjectivity as defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity allows us to understand better how the beloved’s marginalization from the realm of historical time proves advantageous to her amator wishing to defer entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of “women’s time” and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how “women’s time” ultimately thwarts the amator’s often promised generic evolution.
Elegy configures the household (domus) as a response to emerging concepts of the Roman family, an institution whose constitution had been disrupted during the civil wars that preceded the Principate. ...The Tibullan amator, foregrounding the domus' role in shaping personal identity, weighs allegiance to his ancestral estate against the houses of Messalla and puella, and finally professes devotion to Nemesis' threshold; the Propertian amator, exposing the nomenclature of familial relationships as an unstable resource for self-representation, also turns to Cynthia in a final attempt to consecrate the domus. Such appropriations of the Roman household are best interpreted as a means by which the amatores locate themselves outside the Augustan vision of normative family relationships.
Like the audience of Phaeacians, Americans have listened attentively to the stories of soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to evaluate, with inevitable frustration, the ...moral and psychological impact of war on the self. Meineck approaches the conflicts staged during the City Dionysia as a healing ritual, one that addressed the psychological needs of a polis beset by almost constant warfare in the fifth century. the author's own experiences directing the Aquila eater's Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives program for communities of contemporary veterans across the United States ofer telling comparanda: those insights of twenty-first century veterans prompted by the reading of ancient tragedies, especially those that foreground the psychological wounds of a life devoted to incessant violence. Tatum's analysis of various eforts to capture news from the battle lines draws out the poignant futility of them all: those oficial dispatches ("All quiet tonight", "Nothing new") that have peppered accounts of war inevitably reduce the complexity and horror of life in combat to neat statistical uniformity. en again, we should ask ourselves when confronted with the hesitant expression on the face of the returning soldier, not to mention the emotional resistance staged by Odysseus, whose tears bring the songs of the famously skilled Demodocus to a halt, how should these horrors be told? Hall cites the pleasure audiences experienced in the films of Sam Peckinpah, though that director has explicitly stated that his graphic depiction of bloodshed, and its consequences spelled out with slow motion camera, was ofered as an implicit criticism of on-screen violence, especially pointed in light of the real-life contemporary violence of the Vietnam War (Peckinpah is quoted at length in Prince 176).
In sketching such an antithesis, Kristeva relies on a tradition of conceptual associations that link men with temporal movement and women with generative space,s a tradition that she traces back to ...the Platonic concept of the chora (...) a feminized "space" that precedes the constitution of difference integral to the production of forms; the same "space," however, is required for the very production of forms and constitutes the site, or "wet nurse" (...), of their "becoming" Tim. 49a, 50c-d, 52a-e.6 Indeed the template that may have shaped Plato's own gendered production of forms in the Timaeus may be traced to the starting point of the Greek literary tradition, where the Odyssey positions a faithful Penelope in Ithaka awaiting her ideologically driven husband to return from the Trojan War. ... while Kristeva's theorizing of women's time usefully foregrounds the spatiality and stasis associated with women in order to account for their position marginal to the symbolic order, it would appear that Propertius, in according his male and female subjects roles as sites of temporal progress or spatial delay (respectively), is drawing on a wider network of ancient assumptions about men, women, space, and time.
