Ut imago poesis : a pastiche of Virgil and oVid in the cento NarcissUs (original) (raw)
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Horace’s learned audience and readers would have noticed the contrast of Odes 4.15 with Odes 1.6, but we cannot tell how they would have interpreted it. Considering that in the recusatio of 1.6 the poet had provided a restricted image of his lyric domain, leaving out civic and political aspects of it, for the purpose of enhancing the conventional antithesis between epic and ‘slender’ genres, some may have detected in the sphragis of Odes 4.15 and of the entire book 4, a palinode retracting the earlier narrow portrayal of his lyric poetry in the programmatic recusatio of Odes 1.6. Others may have seen in it a statement regarding the new direction his lyric poetry had taken since the publication of Odes 1-3, that he now foregrounded his achievement of expanding the boundaries of lyric. In either case they would have recognized the Virgilian inspiration and would have probably read the last stanza as a celebration of the recently published Aeneid and a tribute to Virgil, something which Horace himself will explicitly do a few months later (Epistles 2.1.245-247).
Ovid's Narcissus ( Met. 3.339-510): Echoes of Oedipus
American Journal of Philology, 2000
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions OVID'S NARCISSUS {MET. 3.339-510): ECHOES OF OEDIPUS Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos NARCISSISTIC THEBES? Ovid's tales of Echo and Narcissus, while mutually enhancing in their magnificently suggestive symmetries,1 have long been considered an oddity in their larger narrative context.2 Otis, for instance, is not alone in feeling that they are quite "extraneous" to the Theban milieu which dominates this particular stretch of the Metamorphoses, since they seem only superficially linked to the tragic city through the figure of Tiresias.3 Some scholars have tried to solve the problem of their inclusion in Ovid's "Thebaid" (3.1-4.603) by pointing to thematic correspondences that connect "Narcissus and Echo" to other episodes in the narrative vicinity, such as fatal love,4 the intervention of a vengeful di? vinity,5 or the problematization of sight.6 Such sequences of thematic patterns, though, are a rather ubiquitous "surface phenomenon" which can be traced in various ways throughout the entire poem, and which hardly ever explain Ovid's poetry in and of themselves.7 Thus, such the-1 Scholars tend to assume that the linking of their fates is indeed an Ovidian inven? tion. See most recently Kenney 1986, 392. 2On the question of Ovid's possible sources see Eitrem 1935; Castiglioni 1906, 215-19; Rosati 1983, 10-15. As Hardie points out (1988, 73), "the extent of Ovid's originality in his handling of the stories of Narcissus and Echo is difficult to gauge given the frag? mentary state of our knowledge of Hellenistic poetry." 3Otis 1966, 231. 4Schmidt 1991, 111-12. 5For the significance of this theme in Ovid's Theban cycle see Hardie 1990. 6For a graphic illustration of the recurrence of this theme throughout Ovid's The? baid cf. Cancik 1967, 46. 7 Perhaps the most useful study of thematic patterning in the Metamorphoses is Schmidt 1991. Yet even his very flexible analysis of Ovid's Themenfuhrung, a concept bor? rowed from music, is unable to explain the presence and function of the Narcissus and Echo episodes in their wider context (cf. his discussion on pp. 111-12), ultimately showing the limitations of this line of approach when it comes to understanding the poetics of a specific passage (which is, admittedly, not Schmidt's interest).
The Pseudo-Virgilian Culex: What Kind of Parody?
2013
In this short essay, I am not going to discuss either the authorship or the date of the Culex, which I personally regard as non-Virgilian but possibly late Republican. This short epic, transmitted as a product of Virgil's literary apprenticeship, is an extremely interesting and sadly neglected chapter of Roman literary history. Surprisingly, the Roman Batrachomyomachia did not attract much attention from postmodern criticism of the eighthties and nineties; and the only reason for this lies, in my view, in the critic's persistent embarassment with the fact that such literary personalities as Lucan, Martial and Statius read and worshipped this epic burlesque as genuinely Virgilian 1. Only very few scholars are ready to believe that nowadays, but it may be important to ask why the generations following Vergil should regard this childish literary artifact as genuinely Virgilian. The most obvious explanation is the one suggested by Glenn Most: they believed it to be Virgilian because it contains Vergil in nuce: it starts as a pastoral, it includes an extensive Praise of Pastoral Life-a didactic passage corresponding to Vergil's o fortunatos nimium (georg. II 458 ff.)-and it ends with a vision of the Underworld which has a strong Orphic-Pythagorean flavour and culminates in a catalogue of Roman leaders in Elysium 2. But was that really enough to convince Lucan, Martial and Statius? I think not; and I am convinced that we do not want to look for more just because what they believed is so discomforting. In other words, the intriguing question about «what is Vergilian about the Gnat» is being subconsciously avoided in view of the highly unlikely possibility that Virgil actually wrote this «ebenso kümmerliches wie anmaßliches Machwerk von dekadenter Morbidität» 3. The poem can in fact be read as a literary identikit of the young Vergil. It contains everything one would expect it to have: an excess of neoteric style, blending of bucolic, Greek myth and Roman history, a bit of Pythagorean mysticism, heavy parody of Catullus and Lucretius and, above all, no intertextuality directly involving the canonic texts of Virgil-no furta, and especially no clumsy borrowings one would expect from a secondrate imitator 1. This leads many modern critics to believe that the poem is an ingenious
Virgilian Criticism and the Intertextual Aeneid
Mnemosyne, 2023
This review article of Joseph Farrell’s 2021 monograph on Virgil’s Aeneid (Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity, Princeton and Oxford) takes the cue from Farrell’s analysis of Virgil’s intertextuality with the Homeric epics and provides a methodological re-assessment of intertextuality in Virgilian studies and Latin literature more broadly. It attempts to retrace the theoretical history and some of the main applications of Latin intertextual studies and suggests some possible ways for Latinists to engage more profoundly with deconstructive criticism and post-critique.
This paper examines the well-known Virgilian scene of the cave, in which Dido and Aeneas discover their intimacy for the first time: I will firstly define the passage rhetorically, and secondly study the Renaissance reinterpretations of it. In particular I try to : – discuss the polysemy of the cave; – define the history of pathetic fallacy and its subcategories, providing examples from the Aeneid; – establish the characteristics of a contra-pathetic fallacy, as a category that it could be useful to analyze; and, – study the Renaissance reworkings of the cave scene, in so far as they mirror the dialectical
From Medusa's Gaze to the myth of narcissus: Textual Jouissance and theoretical hubris
European Journal of English Studies, 1997
On 15 July 1994 the Times Literary Supplement devoted a whole issue to the question of critical theory, its contribution to the area of literature and its future (pp. 3-14). The title of this issue, 'Critical Theory Now', laid the emphasis on the present state of literary theory after more than twenty-in fact, almost thirty-years of 'official existence'. What could hardly be ignored in this issue was a growing anxiety on the part of a large number of critics concerning theory's inflated interest in and projection of itself; in other words, to adopt a term popular with some of its detractors, its narcissism. 1 In his painting of Narcissus (Figure 1), Cigoli offers an eloquent picture of the most familiar version of the myth. Lying on his side next to a thin, hardly perceptible line which fails to keep the two levels of the painting (reality and its representation) distinct, Narcissus is already at-sorbed, swallowed away 1 from reality and the objective other, the dim figure of Echo in the painting, who, though captured in a desire to rush forward, to invade Narcissus's hermetically subjective and self-reflective space, seems to be retreating more and more into the background. His gaze, hidden