Serena S Witzke | Hamilton College (original) (raw)
Papers by Serena S Witzke
Believing Ancient Women: A Feminist Epistemology for Greece and Rome, 2023
Eds. Bowen, Gilbert, & Nally..
Classical Outlook 97.1, 2022
A Cultural History of Comedy, Antiquity volume
Bloomsbury Methuen series: A Cultural History of Comedy, Antiquity volume, ed. Michael Ewans.
Blackwell Companion to Plautus, 2020
Blackwell Companion to Plautus, eds. Dorota Dutsch and George F. Franko.
Oscar Wilde and the Classics, 2017
eds. Alastair Blanshard, Iarla Manny, Kathleen Riley, Oxford Univ. Press.
In Topographies of Ancient Greek and Roman Violence. Eds. Garrett G. Fagan and Werner Riess. Uni... more In Topographies of Ancient Greek and Roman Violence. Eds. Garrett G. Fagan and Werner Riess. University of Michigan Press. 2015. In press.
Helios
42.1 (Spring 2015). Special issue on sex labor in antiquity, pages 7-27. *Winner of Women's Clas... more 42.1 (Spring 2015). Special issue on sex labor in antiquity, pages 7-27.
*Winner of Women's Classical Caucus Barbara McManus Award for Best Published Article 2016*
In Menander in Contexts. Ed. Alan Sommerstein. Routledge. 2014. 215-32.
Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy, 2019
Ed. Alan Sommerstein. Entries on: modern western comedy, as heir of New Comedy; Maurice Guillaume... more Ed. Alan Sommerstein. Entries on: modern western comedy, as heir of New Comedy; Maurice Guillaume Guizot; and Oscar Wilde.
Dissertation. Director: Sharon L. James. Filed April 2014.
M.A. Thesis. Director: Claude Eilers.
Book Reviews by Serena S Witzke
Journal of Roman Studies, 2022
Plautus and Terence were popular in their own time but not regularly performed afterwards, and co... more Plautus and Terence were popular in their own time but not regularly performed afterwards, and comedies of any authorship ceased to be performed by Augustus' time: such is the conventional wisdom reexamined in this volume. Mathias Hanses claims that New Comedy was consistently revived in public through the Flavian era (this study's limit); Cicero, satirists and love poets alluded to comedy's plots, characters and themes; and elites continued to write comedies and hear private recitals. There is a good case for continued public performance in chapter 1, but the intertextual evidence is less convincing. The introduction establishes the volume's throughlines: comedy was considered a 'mirror of life'; as the plays aged, their fandom became increasingly elite; tragedy, comedy and mime were considered three separate genres throughout the period, and comedy specically was pitted against mime as a matter of not just taste but morality. These throughlines are never adequately connected to the thesis of reperformance. H. then denes 'New Comedy' as palliata, togata and Greek comedies. Ch. 1 outlines the record of reperformances within Plautus' and Terence's lifetimes and collects the literary and material evidence for revivals at public festivals until at least the late rst century C.E., references to private stagings in elite homes and evidence that elite authors continued to write comedies. H.'s parameters are literary and epigraphical references to comoedi, histriones and comoedia. We see evidence of reperformance in the middle Republic in the records of instaurationes, as well as in prologues to Plautus' Casina and Terence's Hecyra. Epigraphic evidence commemorates comoedi throughout the rst century C.E. Through this survey we learn that, by the rst century B.C.E., the palliatae were considered quaintly vintage, with archaic language and plots that look quite tame compared to contemporary mime. As scholarly interest grew, so did elite appreciation. But why, if comedy became an elite hobby, continue to stage it for the public? In ch. 2, H. offers an analysis of dramatic references in Cicero's In Catilinam 1 and 2 and Pro Murena from 63 B.C.E., but nds more tragedy than comedy. He also looks at the interplay of mime and comedy in In Pisonem and Pro Caelio, analysing the use of stock types Cicero's audience would recognise from the stage. H. argues that, if Cicero lifted the 'mirror of life' to his opponent and saw mime, his opponent should lose to his client, even if the client was, like Caelius, cast as a silly comic adulescens amans. The war for Rome's morals continues in ch. 3, where H. argues that satirists felt the gentle foibles of comedy gave way to the degeneracy of mime in the early empire and Flavian periods. In Sat. 9, 'the pest', a mime-like character, interferes with Horace's palliata. When the speaker implores Fuscus, an elite writer of comedy, the man begs off: comedy departs, leaving the speaker with only mime for company. H. likewise observes the slide from comedy to mime in Juvenal 3, as Umbricius, a comic parasite, is literally driven out of Rome by a raucous cast: comedy's mirror of life has cracked and all of Rome has sunk into mime. H. nds previously underappreciated intertexts to comedy in Horace's Satires and explores Horace's use of stock types like the durus pater and servus Davusbut the durus pater is recognisably Terentian (which argues more for reading than performance) and Davus is a staple of Menandrian comedy. Ch. 4 backtracks to late Republican (heteroerotic) love poetry, but here H. limits his inquiry to Eunuchus, especially the opening exclusus amator speech. H. argues for verbal echoes in Aeneid 4 and Catullus 109 but, again, his thesis has been that poets (and their readership) viewed the comedies. The love poets' interest in this play could easily be explained by Terence's well-attested popularity as a school author. A more convincing argument could be made by focusing on what is Plautine in love poetry, as Plautus was not as revered an author. Catullus' reliance on comic tropes and characters is clear, but not a new argument (C. Polt, Catuallus and Roman Comedy (2021)). The Conclusion returns to the opposition of comedy and mime in Livy's Bacchanalia tale (39.8-18).
Journal of Roman Studies, 2020
with several more individual works, series and translations in progress. Each directs itself at a... more with several more individual works, series and translations in progress. Each directs itself at a different audience, from novice to expert. Dinter's Companion walks a middle road, as its prologue notes: 'Whilst the volume provides introductory material throughout, each chapter also aims to awaken the reader's curiosity and to be useful to "think with" when pondering Roman comedy rather than to sound an authoritative and exhaustive voice on one particular subject' (xvii). So what framework does this volume offer to 'think with'? D.'s Companion is divided into four parts, covering the 'world', 'fabric', 'sociology' and 'reception' of Roman comedy. Each part invites the reader to explore, through representative examples, an important aspect of Roman comedy studies. Alison Sharrock's Introduction challenges the modern notion that Roman comedy is not 'funny'. She reminds the reader that a literary text is not a script and that comedy represented different things over time. In arguing the playwrights' subversion of canned plots and stock characters, Sharrock often denes them reductively, but she nds wider variation than the repetitiveness generally claimed. In Part I 'The World of Roman Comedy', Gesine Manuwald examines the 'contexts' of Roman comedy: palliata, Republican drama and literature, the historical and social background and its audiences. Of note is the inclusion of lesser-known comic playwrights and precursors to Plautus and Terence. Costas Panayotakis surveys native and non-native Italian drama, such as mime, fabulae Atellanae and Fescennine verses, concluding that these 'low dramas' inuenced Plautus, though the details are unclear. Mario Telò, in his jargony 'Poetics of Adaptation', asserts that the process of adaptation allowed the playwrights to create their own cultural identities, examining Plautus' vortit barbare and Terence's defence of contaminatio. Finally, the late Robert Germany argues that since we have come to understand politics as a 'broader set of discourses pertaining to the mediation of power in society and to the very constitution of social life' (66), Roman comedy was not apolitical. C. W. Marshall opens Part II 'The Fabric of Roman Comedy', examining the hypothetical staging of Mercator and Hecyra and the ways in which Plautus and Terence used eavesdropping scenes, descriptions of travel, and entrances and exits to build verisimilitude for the audience. Timothy J. Moore is tapped once more for his lucid explanation of metres in Roman comedy and what they have to do with characterisation and sympathy building, using the Casina as an example. Isabella Tardin Cardoso sketches the repertoire of non-verbal techniques available to the actor and speculates as to their deployment in Amphitryo, Miles and Eunuchus, an admittedly difcult task, given the ephemerality of non-verbal action. David Christenson muses on metatheatre, which he limits to the playwrights' reections on the genre of Roman comedy within their works, through Pseudolus, Rudens and Eunuchus. Finally, Evangelos Karakasis surveys the performatively archaistic 'early Latin' elements in Roman comedy's grammar, vocabulary and syntax. In Part III 'The Sociology of Roman Comedy', D. begins with the moralising aspects of relationships between fathers, sons and tutors. William Fitzgerald briey examines the gure of the servus callidus and topic of slave torture. Dorota Dutsch interrogates Freud's 'mother/whore' dichotomy by connecting the ways in which meretrices and lenae perform both sex labour and mothering, asserting that the playwrights themselves break this binary. Anna Clark reminds us JRS 2020, page 1 of 2.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2019
BMCR 2019.06.14
Journal of Roman Studies , 2018
Prostitution in antiquity has long interested scholars (R. Flemming, JRS 89 (1999), 38-61; A. Gla... more Prostitution in antiquity has long interested scholars (R. Flemming, JRS 89 (1999), 38-61; A. Glazebrook and M. M. Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean (2011); T. A. J. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution ). The 'world's oldest profession' continues to inspire new frameworks conceiving of sex labour, people who practised it, those who promoted it and the clients who patronised it, most recently Anise K. Strong's monograph on 'the uidity and mutability of roles of "whore" and "wife" in the Roman world' (1). S., who has worked on reception of Roman sexuality in TV and lm, analyses the complex relationship between meretrices and matronae in literature, epigraphy and material culture from republican Rome (second century B.C.E.) to the High Empire (third century C.E.), primarily, but not exclusively, in Italy.
Works in Progress by Serena S Witzke
Believing Ancient Women: A Feminist Epistemology for Greece and Rome, 2023
Eds. Bowen, Gilbert, & Nally..
Classical Outlook 97.1, 2022
A Cultural History of Comedy, Antiquity volume
Bloomsbury Methuen series: A Cultural History of Comedy, Antiquity volume, ed. Michael Ewans.
Blackwell Companion to Plautus, 2020
Blackwell Companion to Plautus, eds. Dorota Dutsch and George F. Franko.
Oscar Wilde and the Classics, 2017
eds. Alastair Blanshard, Iarla Manny, Kathleen Riley, Oxford Univ. Press.
In Topographies of Ancient Greek and Roman Violence. Eds. Garrett G. Fagan and Werner Riess. Uni... more In Topographies of Ancient Greek and Roman Violence. Eds. Garrett G. Fagan and Werner Riess. University of Michigan Press. 2015. In press.
Helios
42.1 (Spring 2015). Special issue on sex labor in antiquity, pages 7-27. *Winner of Women's Clas... more 42.1 (Spring 2015). Special issue on sex labor in antiquity, pages 7-27.
*Winner of Women's Classical Caucus Barbara McManus Award for Best Published Article 2016*
In Menander in Contexts. Ed. Alan Sommerstein. Routledge. 2014. 215-32.
Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy, 2019
Ed. Alan Sommerstein. Entries on: modern western comedy, as heir of New Comedy; Maurice Guillaume... more Ed. Alan Sommerstein. Entries on: modern western comedy, as heir of New Comedy; Maurice Guillaume Guizot; and Oscar Wilde.
Dissertation. Director: Sharon L. James. Filed April 2014.
M.A. Thesis. Director: Claude Eilers.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2022
Plautus and Terence were popular in their own time but not regularly performed afterwards, and co... more Plautus and Terence were popular in their own time but not regularly performed afterwards, and comedies of any authorship ceased to be performed by Augustus' time: such is the conventional wisdom reexamined in this volume. Mathias Hanses claims that New Comedy was consistently revived in public through the Flavian era (this study's limit); Cicero, satirists and love poets alluded to comedy's plots, characters and themes; and elites continued to write comedies and hear private recitals. There is a good case for continued public performance in chapter 1, but the intertextual evidence is less convincing. The introduction establishes the volume's throughlines: comedy was considered a 'mirror of life'; as the plays aged, their fandom became increasingly elite; tragedy, comedy and mime were considered three separate genres throughout the period, and comedy specically was pitted against mime as a matter of not just taste but morality. These throughlines are never adequately connected to the thesis of reperformance. H. then denes 'New Comedy' as palliata, togata and Greek comedies. Ch. 1 outlines the record of reperformances within Plautus' and Terence's lifetimes and collects the literary and material evidence for revivals at public festivals until at least the late rst century C.E., references to private stagings in elite homes and evidence that elite authors continued to write comedies. H.'s parameters are literary and epigraphical references to comoedi, histriones and comoedia. We see evidence of reperformance in the middle Republic in the records of instaurationes, as well as in prologues to Plautus' Casina and Terence's Hecyra. Epigraphic evidence commemorates comoedi throughout the rst century C.E. Through this survey we learn that, by the rst century B.C.E., the palliatae were considered quaintly vintage, with archaic language and plots that look quite tame compared to contemporary mime. As scholarly interest grew, so did elite appreciation. But why, if comedy became an elite hobby, continue to stage it for the public? In ch. 2, H. offers an analysis of dramatic references in Cicero's In Catilinam 1 and 2 and Pro Murena from 63 B.C.E., but nds more tragedy than comedy. He also looks at the interplay of mime and comedy in In Pisonem and Pro Caelio, analysing the use of stock types Cicero's audience would recognise from the stage. H. argues that, if Cicero lifted the 'mirror of life' to his opponent and saw mime, his opponent should lose to his client, even if the client was, like Caelius, cast as a silly comic adulescens amans. The war for Rome's morals continues in ch. 3, where H. argues that satirists felt the gentle foibles of comedy gave way to the degeneracy of mime in the early empire and Flavian periods. In Sat. 9, 'the pest', a mime-like character, interferes with Horace's palliata. When the speaker implores Fuscus, an elite writer of comedy, the man begs off: comedy departs, leaving the speaker with only mime for company. H. likewise observes the slide from comedy to mime in Juvenal 3, as Umbricius, a comic parasite, is literally driven out of Rome by a raucous cast: comedy's mirror of life has cracked and all of Rome has sunk into mime. H. nds previously underappreciated intertexts to comedy in Horace's Satires and explores Horace's use of stock types like the durus pater and servus Davusbut the durus pater is recognisably Terentian (which argues more for reading than performance) and Davus is a staple of Menandrian comedy. Ch. 4 backtracks to late Republican (heteroerotic) love poetry, but here H. limits his inquiry to Eunuchus, especially the opening exclusus amator speech. H. argues for verbal echoes in Aeneid 4 and Catullus 109 but, again, his thesis has been that poets (and their readership) viewed the comedies. The love poets' interest in this play could easily be explained by Terence's well-attested popularity as a school author. A more convincing argument could be made by focusing on what is Plautine in love poetry, as Plautus was not as revered an author. Catullus' reliance on comic tropes and characters is clear, but not a new argument (C. Polt, Catuallus and Roman Comedy (2021)). The Conclusion returns to the opposition of comedy and mime in Livy's Bacchanalia tale (39.8-18).
Journal of Roman Studies, 2020
with several more individual works, series and translations in progress. Each directs itself at a... more with several more individual works, series and translations in progress. Each directs itself at a different audience, from novice to expert. Dinter's Companion walks a middle road, as its prologue notes: 'Whilst the volume provides introductory material throughout, each chapter also aims to awaken the reader's curiosity and to be useful to "think with" when pondering Roman comedy rather than to sound an authoritative and exhaustive voice on one particular subject' (xvii). So what framework does this volume offer to 'think with'? D.'s Companion is divided into four parts, covering the 'world', 'fabric', 'sociology' and 'reception' of Roman comedy. Each part invites the reader to explore, through representative examples, an important aspect of Roman comedy studies. Alison Sharrock's Introduction challenges the modern notion that Roman comedy is not 'funny'. She reminds the reader that a literary text is not a script and that comedy represented different things over time. In arguing the playwrights' subversion of canned plots and stock characters, Sharrock often denes them reductively, but she nds wider variation than the repetitiveness generally claimed. In Part I 'The World of Roman Comedy', Gesine Manuwald examines the 'contexts' of Roman comedy: palliata, Republican drama and literature, the historical and social background and its audiences. Of note is the inclusion of lesser-known comic playwrights and precursors to Plautus and Terence. Costas Panayotakis surveys native and non-native Italian drama, such as mime, fabulae Atellanae and Fescennine verses, concluding that these 'low dramas' inuenced Plautus, though the details are unclear. Mario Telò, in his jargony 'Poetics of Adaptation', asserts that the process of adaptation allowed the playwrights to create their own cultural identities, examining Plautus' vortit barbare and Terence's defence of contaminatio. Finally, the late Robert Germany argues that since we have come to understand politics as a 'broader set of discourses pertaining to the mediation of power in society and to the very constitution of social life' (66), Roman comedy was not apolitical. C. W. Marshall opens Part II 'The Fabric of Roman Comedy', examining the hypothetical staging of Mercator and Hecyra and the ways in which Plautus and Terence used eavesdropping scenes, descriptions of travel, and entrances and exits to build verisimilitude for the audience. Timothy J. Moore is tapped once more for his lucid explanation of metres in Roman comedy and what they have to do with characterisation and sympathy building, using the Casina as an example. Isabella Tardin Cardoso sketches the repertoire of non-verbal techniques available to the actor and speculates as to their deployment in Amphitryo, Miles and Eunuchus, an admittedly difcult task, given the ephemerality of non-verbal action. David Christenson muses on metatheatre, which he limits to the playwrights' reections on the genre of Roman comedy within their works, through Pseudolus, Rudens and Eunuchus. Finally, Evangelos Karakasis surveys the performatively archaistic 'early Latin' elements in Roman comedy's grammar, vocabulary and syntax. In Part III 'The Sociology of Roman Comedy', D. begins with the moralising aspects of relationships between fathers, sons and tutors. William Fitzgerald briey examines the gure of the servus callidus and topic of slave torture. Dorota Dutsch interrogates Freud's 'mother/whore' dichotomy by connecting the ways in which meretrices and lenae perform both sex labour and mothering, asserting that the playwrights themselves break this binary. Anna Clark reminds us JRS 2020, page 1 of 2.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2019
BMCR 2019.06.14
Journal of Roman Studies , 2018
Prostitution in antiquity has long interested scholars (R. Flemming, JRS 89 (1999), 38-61; A. Gla... more Prostitution in antiquity has long interested scholars (R. Flemming, JRS 89 (1999), 38-61; A. Glazebrook and M. M. Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean (2011); T. A. J. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution ). The 'world's oldest profession' continues to inspire new frameworks conceiving of sex labour, people who practised it, those who promoted it and the clients who patronised it, most recently Anise K. Strong's monograph on 'the uidity and mutability of roles of "whore" and "wife" in the Roman world' (1). S., who has worked on reception of Roman sexuality in TV and lm, analyses the complex relationship between meretrices and matronae in literature, epigraphy and material culture from republican Rome (second century B.C.E.) to the High Empire (third century C.E.), primarily, but not exclusively, in Italy.
Women in Roman Historiography, 2025
Eds. L. Webb and O. Elder (Brill). Submission winter 2024.
Constructing Gender in the Comic Mode, 2024
Eds. M. Alexandrou and A. Petrides. Submission summer 2023.
For University of Wisconsin Press planned series of the corpus of Greek and Roman New Comedy. Se... more For University of Wisconsin Press planned series of the corpus of Greek and Roman New Comedy. Series editor: Sharon L. James.
Translation complete; submission to University of Wisconsin Press as one sample for planned serie... more Translation complete; submission to University of Wisconsin Press as one sample for planned series of the corpus of Greek and Roman New Comedy. Series editor: Sharon L. James.
Roundtable at SCS 2017 (Toronto) Explanation and examples for specifications grading in Classics.... more Roundtable at SCS 2017 (Toronto)
Explanation and examples for specifications grading in Classics.
Co-organized with Ted Gellar-Goad
(if you are interested in seeing versions of the same syllabus in Specs and non-Specs, email me at serena.witzke@gmail.com)
Co-Organizer of roundtable; Feminism and Classics VII, May 2016. Seattle, WA.
Co-Organizer of panel, The Feminine in Propertius Book 4. APA, Jan. 2014. Chicago.
CAMWS-Southern Section, Oct. 2010. Richmond.
Syllabus for Gen-Ed Classical Tradition course
An Intermediate Latin class to which the specifications grading format has been applied. Unlike ... more An Intermediate Latin class to which the specifications grading format has been applied. Unlike traditional grading, specs grading offers "levels" to which students aspire, each with criteria for that level. By meeting the criteria of every assignment at their chosen level, students choose their final grade.