CLS essay

Classical Receptions Journal, 2016

This article examines how Ovid, Seneca, and Ted Hughes incorporate intertexts to Latin or English poets (respectively) in their translations. These intertexts effectively become sites to negotiate their reception of their poetic predecessors. It is shown that their translations thus act as marked instances of metapoetic, thematic, and philosophical reflection, and reveal the manner in which these poets have read the poetry of their predecessors and reflect upon their position in relation to their literary and mythological traditions.

This paper examines the way that Seneca manipulates language from intertexts in his works and how this process differs in his tragedies from his prose philosophy. In his writings, Seneca often features an intertext at an early point, the language of which will then become a leitmotiv for the work as a whole. These inter-texts are emblematic of Seneca's writing style and show how Seneca imagines his genres, his readership, and, ultimately, his message. This paper focuses on two intertexts, from the Thyestes and the Naturales Quaestiones, in order to examine how the intratextual repetition of intertextual language functions. In each case, Seneca recontextualizes the language in his new generic environment and creates original interpretations through the fusion of source and target texts. The intratextual repetition not only provides structure to these works, but also helps to forge the ideal reader that Seneca desires. My paper stresses how the dramatic genre encourages a more 'open' interpretation of such intertexts. 1 The characters provide their own particular viewpoint on the language and their focalized views necessarily produce difference from the very act of repetition. Seneca's Stoic prose works often have a more 'closed' trajectory in which the intertexts are made to speak to the philosophical issues at hand. In the Naturales Quaestiones, I examine one of the earlier intertexts in the work (a nod to Ovid's Metamorphoses) and show how its repetitions throughout the work merge ethical and physical details. Seneca does this not only to emphasize the importance of the Metamorphoses to this opening book, but also to stress how scrutinizing natura includes scrutinizing the language used to describe natura. Such a practice highlights the way these two foundational facets of Stoicism are linked by the third of the triad, namely logic, which for Seneca revolves around the correct rhetorical use of language .

Classical World, 2022

This article suggests a novel approach for the interpretation of Seneca's Apocolocyntosis. I argue that the text represents Seneca's attempt to lay claim to the Metamorphoses, a canonical poem influential on his own corpus, by engaging in a virtual rewrite of that text. I call this phenomenon fan fiction, since the character of Diespiter, in suggesting that Claudius' deification be added to the Metamorphoses, meets Hellekson and Busse's criteria for fan fiction; that is, user-generated content inspired by canonical material. Seneca thus not only interacts creatively with Ovid's epic but also carves out a place in the literary tradition for himself and his parodic portrayal of Claudius. References to Seneca's Thyestes help flesh out the author's unique engagement with the Latin literary canon.

Journal of Roman Studies, 2002

REVIEWS Dryden in order to justify Heywood's humanist 'translation-as-imitation' (io), but his comprehensive study of the cultural, economic, and literary conditions in which Heywood translates Ovid renders such justification unwarranted. A complete translation of the proem and all three books of Ovid's Ars Amatoria then follows, each book supported by a detailed commentary in which S. highlights the relation between Heywood's Ars and the Ovidian text. Appendices include textual notes for each of the books, including discrepancies and editorial emendations, a brief but useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and separate indices for introduction and commentaries, and for the translation itself. However, it is somewhat unfortunate that, given Heywood's particular-and, for a classicist of his time, unusual-concern for the accurate spelling and printing of his work-this new edition should be not entirely free from typographical errors (4 'may' for 'many'). In his introduction S. observes that Heywood's 'colleagues in the theaters and courts thought his translation worth reading; literary pirates proved that it was worth stealing; the consumers and publishing underworld of the next generation demonstrated that Loues Schoole was worth reading and stealing-again and again' (29). Colleagues in the field of Classical reception, literary critics of Renaissance literature, and a new generation of readers may well agree.

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

2011

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the multifaceted personae of Ovid's Amores, specifically in Amores 1.4 and 2.5. These personae range from Ovid as poet (poeta), lover (amator), and love teacher (praeceptor amoris); the poet's love interest, the puella; the rival, the vir; other unnamed rivals; and reader. I argue that Ovid complicates the roles of the personae in his poetry by means of subversion, inversion and amalgamation. Furthermore, I conclude that as readers, when we understand how these personae interact with each other and ourselves (as readers), we can better comprehend Ovid's poetry and quite possibly gain some insight into his other poetic works. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One. Introduction 1 Chapter Two. Personae in Amores 1.4 12 Chapter Three. Personae in Amores 2.5 36 Chapter Four. Conclusion 59 Bibliography 64 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ars adeo latet arte sua. Met. 10.252 In his book Arts of Love (1993), Kennedy discusses the Pygmalion myth in the tenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses: 1 Pygmalion creates a statue; the story 'ends' with it becoming a 'real' woman. However, a sign 'stands' not for reality, but for another sign in a continuing chain of signification. A statue stands for the female body, but the female body is a signifier in its turn; and so on. It is the function and effect of rhetoric to efface itself, to dissolve the distinction between 'illusion' and 'reality' (ars adeo latet arte sua). The object of such rhetorical persuasion may be its exponent no less than its audience. Pygmalion's statue 'becomes' a 'real' woman; her 'reality' is beyond question because she 'represents' nothing beyond the fulfillment of his desire. The same concept of a realistic yet illusive kind of character can also be seen (or rather, read about) in Ovid's Amores. 2 As a result of these illusive, realistic characters-or what I prefer to call personae-, Ovid is often judged (or even criticized) 3 as deceptive, parodic, and witty. The focus of this thesis is how these characteristics function and what that function suggests about Ovid's poetry. My primary texts will be Amores 1.4 and 2.5, using thorough studies of personae in this 1 Specifically found in lines 243-297 of Met. 10. 2 I owe thanks to Tara Welch, Michael Shaw, and Pamela Gordon for their patience, profound insight, and supportive assessments that have helped make this thesis both comprehensible and knowledgeable. 3 Kennedy (1993) 93 makes a good point, which can be applied to Ovid's critics: "Elegy is thus no less artificial and rule-bound a literary genre than Virgil's Eclogues, the only difference being that the literary genre in elegy wear city clothes and live in Rome whereas the characters in the Eclogues wear rustic clothes and live in the country, a theme Veyne then goes on to develop in his chapter 7." Katz (2009) 2 explains that up until the 1970s, many scholars viewed Ovid as a mere imitator of his elegiac predecessors and thus considered his use of "parody" and constant irony and humor to be deficiencies. However, Katz (2009) 2 includes that many scholars today see Ovid's elegiac lover as "complex, humorous, and irreverent-as a true desultor amoris whom the poet portrays as both the lover dominated by his puella and the dominating lover who shrewdly manipulates his beloved." 145 And like when a Maeonian or Carian woman stains ivory with crimson to be a cheek piece for horses; And it lies in a treasure chamber, and though many horsemen pray to possess it; but, as a king's prize, it lies there, 87 Miller (2002) 257. 88 Booth (1991) 122. Booth also adds that "Roman thought lilies & roses 'went' together; see Plin. Nat. xxi. 22 et interpositum (lilium) etiam maxime rosas decet."

2016

This chapter surveys the reception of Senecan tragedy in sixteenth-century England, particularly in the 1560s. The chapter addresses traditions of transmission and translation, the place of Seneca in mid-sixteenth century literary culture, approaches to translation and adaptation, critical reception, and the influence of the mid-sixteenth century translations on later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatists.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2006