Playing gods Feldherr, Andrew; Feldherr, Andrew
2010., 20100816, 2010, 2010-08-16
eBook
This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods ...argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts.
Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid’s ...Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid’s epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid’s constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who “sees” the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation). The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid’s epic.
This book offers an analysis of paratextual infrastructures in editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses and shows how paratexts functioned as important instruments for publishers and commentators to ...influence readers of this ancient text.
Motiv o Salmakidi in Hermafroditu, o spojitvi ženske in moškega v dvospolno telo, sodi med raritete antične mitološke zakladnice. Odstopa tudi od prevladujočega vsebinskega vzorca v Ovidijevih ...Metamorfozah: tokrat nimfa izjemoma ni žrtev posilstva, ampak storilka nasilnega dejanja nad moškim. Ni ugotovljivo, odkod je Ovidij ta motiv povzel, ali pa si ga je izmislil sam, kot domnevajo nekateri komentatorji, vendar hermafrodite pred njim omenja že Diodor Sicilski.
This is the first direct literary adaptation of Vergil'sAeneid. The present study demonstrates how, in less than one thousand lines, Ovid revisits the epic world of Aeneas and subjects it to a ...reading that is a paradigm of critical analysis, a statement of originality, and a powerful claim to the epic heritage and Vergilian succession.
The epic Metamorphoses , Ovid’s most renowned work, has regained its stature among the masterpieces of great poets such as Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus. Yet its irreverent tone and bold ...defiance of generic boundaries set the Metamorphoses apart from its contemporaries. Ovid before Exile provides a compelling new reading of the epic, examining the text in light of circumstances surrounding the final years of Augustus’ reign, a time when a culture of poets and patrons was in sharp decline, discouraging and even endangering artistic freedom of expression.     Patricia J. Johnson demonstrates how the production of art—specifically poetry—changed dramatically during the reign of Augustus. By Ovid’s final decade in Rome, the atmosphere for artistic work had transformed, leading to a drop in poetic production of quality. Johnson shows how Ovid, in the episodes of artistic creation that anchor his Metamorphoses , responded to his audience and commented on artistic circumstances in Rome.
Trends in Classics, a new series and journal to be edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos, will publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts ...the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications will seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. The series Trends in Classics Studies welcomes monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and collections of papers; it will provide an important forum for the ongoing debate about where Classics fits in modern cultural and historical studies. The journal Trends in Classics will be published twice a year with approx. 160 pp. per issue. Each year one issue will be devoted to a specific subject with articles edited by a guest editor.
This paper argues that Ovid was familiar with the philosophy of the Hellenistic dialectician Diodorus Cronus, in particular, his views on fate, which he probably knew from Cicero’s De Fato, and the ...so-called “horned” and “veiled” arguments associated with him. Ovid draws on these aspects of Diodorus’ philosophy to tell the story of Cipus in Metamorphoses 15 ; he uses them to portray Cipus’ attempt to avoid kingship as a highly ambiguous and unnecessarily risky, if not self-defeating, exercise in forestalling fate and thus leaves open the question of whether Cipus, in the end, succeeds in his attempt. This reading complements others that have argued that the inescapability of kingship, not Cipus’ moral choice, is the central point of the story. It also adds to our appreciation of Ovid’s use of philosophical material in his epic, an area of growing interest in Ovidian studies, which has thus far paid no attention to Diodorus Cronus and only a little to the influence of Cicero’s philosophical works.
Barbara Pavlock unmasks major figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as surrogates for his narrative persona, highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the Metamorphoses . Although Ovid ...ostensibly validates traditional customs and institutions, instability is in fact a defining feature of both the core epic values and his own poetics.     The Image of the Poet explores issues central to Ovid’s poetics—the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, the reliability of the narrative voice, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry. The work explores the constructed author and complements recent criticism focusing on the reader in the text. 2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
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