Elizabeth Young | Wellesley College (original) (raw)
I am an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and
Knafel Assistant Professor of Humanities at Wellesley
College where I also teach in the Comparative Literature
program.
I work on various aspects of Latin poetry and its reception, with a focus on the poets of the late Republican and Augustan periods.
My book on Catullus and Roman poetic translation
will be out in 2015 from University of Chicago Press.
My current work investigates the phenomenology of
Latin poetry with a focus on the obscene epigrams
of the Carmina Priapea.
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Papers by Elizabeth Young
This article offers a reading of Catullus 4 that positions its protagonist—a talking ship—within ... more This article offers a reading of Catullus 4 that positions its protagonist—a talking ship—within the networks of travel, plunder, and intellectual exchange that attended Rome's annexation of Bithynia. This ship's reported account of his travels embeds, I argue, an anxious discourse on Roman authors' dependence upon books and scholars hailing from the Greek east to deepen their understanding of Hellenistic literature. Through its ambiguous presentation of a Bithynian ship as both a subject and an object, a master and a slave, poem 4 stages a defining first-century concern about the Roman poet's ability to control a poetic tradition drawn from a captive Greece and mediated by a newly conquered region of Asia Minor.
This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil’s Aeneid, foc... more This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil’s Aeneid, focusing on the bee simile in book 1, the poem’s inaugural miniaturizing moment. Deviating from the standard paradigms of Vergilian criticism, I suggest we can learn a great deal about smallness in this poem by studying it through the lens of the sublime. My analysis bypasses the proliferation of Romantic sublimes to draw primarily on a model of sublimity derived from Neil Hertz’s influential reading of Longinus. Read through the Hertzian sublime, miniaturization in the Aeneid is revealed as a subtle articulation of the poem’s running concern with power. The bee simile, I argue, enacts a threefold drama in which hero, author, and reader confront what I call their sublime condition, coming to terms with their implication in immensities beyond their comprehension and control.
This paper analyzes the Orpheus episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a site that investigates the w... more This paper analyzes the Orpheus episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a site that investigates the widespread Augustan ambition of constructing a synthetic literary corpus encompassing both Archaic Greece and contemporary Rome. The tale's ongoing manipulations of form (Orpheus's bodily form, generic form, narrative form) expose the paradoxes riddling this emerging—and enduring—notion of an organic Greco-Romanism.
This article offers a reading of Catullus 4 that positions its protagonist—a talking ship—within ... more This article offers a reading of Catullus 4 that positions its protagonist—a talking ship—within the networks of travel, plunder, and intellectual exchange that attended Rome's annexation of Bithynia. This ship's reported account of his travels embeds, I argue, an anxious discourse on Roman authors' dependence upon books and scholars hailing from the Greek east to deepen their understanding of Hellenistic literature. Through its ambiguous presentation of a Bithynian ship as both a subject and an object, a master and a slave, poem 4 stages a defining first-century concern about the Roman poet's ability to control a poetic tradition drawn from a captive Greece and mediated by a newly conquered region of Asia Minor.
This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil’s Aeneid, foc... more This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil’s Aeneid, focusing on the bee simile in book 1, the poem’s inaugural miniaturizing moment. Deviating from the standard paradigms of Vergilian criticism, I suggest we can learn a great deal about smallness in this poem by studying it through the lens of the sublime. My analysis bypasses the proliferation of Romantic sublimes to draw primarily on a model of sublimity derived from Neil Hertz’s influential reading of Longinus. Read through the Hertzian sublime, miniaturization in the Aeneid is revealed as a subtle articulation of the poem’s running concern with power. The bee simile, I argue, enacts a threefold drama in which hero, author, and reader confront what I call their sublime condition, coming to terms with their implication in immensities beyond their comprehension and control.
This paper analyzes the Orpheus episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a site that investigates the w... more This paper analyzes the Orpheus episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a site that investigates the widespread Augustan ambition of constructing a synthetic literary corpus encompassing both Archaic Greece and contemporary Rome. The tale's ongoing manipulations of form (Orpheus's bodily form, generic form, narrative form) expose the paradoxes riddling this emerging—and enduring—notion of an organic Greco-Romanism.