Ut imago poesis : a pastiche of Virgil and oVid in the cento NarcissUs (original) (raw)

The aim of the paper is to produce a close textual analysis of the short Virgilian cento Narcissus (AL 9 R), which has so far attracted only little attention of classical scholarship. An examination of the poem’s compositional structure, its imagery and register, and, last but not least, of its significant allusions to both Virgil and other Latin treatments of the Narcissus myth is provided. Further, the cento’s underlying metatextual significance, as well as the possibilities of its interpretation in terms of the Lacanian concept of the “mirror stage” and Derridean deconstruction, is discussed.