Barbara Weiden BOYD A Poet’s Return from Exile:
Contemporary Scholarship and the Teaching of Ovid
After a chilly reception for much of the
20th century, in the last 20 years or so Ovid has received
a warm critical welcome back from posthumous exile. In this talk, I
shall look a several of the major critical shifts that have taken
place in this period, using the three stereotypical criticisms of
Ovid articulated by S. Hinds in a valuable article on this poet’s
recent reception (1987). These three categories of critical
disapprobation are: 1) the “shallow and over-explicit”
Ovid; 2) the “excessively literary” Ovid; and 3) the “passive
panegyrist” Ovid. In addressing each of these, I shall include
examples from across the full range of Ovid’s corpus, rather
than limiting myself to recent work on the Metamorphoses
alone. In fact, I think that this is the next important direction for
Ovidian scholarship to take, viz., towards a focus on themes in and
features of Ovid’s poetry that transcend the boundaries of a
given work; and I shall attempt to illustrate the benefits of such
work in this talk by looking at a number of selections from Ovid’s
poetry where more than one of these features comes to the fore.
Earlier criticism of Ovid as shallow and
over-explicit has given way in recent years to an appreciation for
the ways in which Ovid controls style and narrative techniques for
particular effects. Tissol (1997) on syllepsis, Boyd (1997) on
similes, and Rosati (1983), Keith (1992), and Wheeler (1999; 2000) on
narratorial strategies have all looked at Ovid’s careful
structuring of everything from a single hexameter to individual
episodes to an entire narrative arc. The result is a picture not of
self-indulgence but of finely calibrated genius, always provoking a
strong response from the reader.
The literariness of Ovid, previously
dismissed as parody of Virgil and others, has since Hinds’s
book (1987) become clearly an index of Ovid’s remarkable
scholarly accomplishment. New studies of and commentaries on the
Heroides (Barchiesi
[1993]; Kenney[1996]; Knox [1995]; et al.)
and Myers’ book (1994) on Ovidian cosmogonies, among others,
illustrate the depth of Ovid’s reading, his engage-ment with
Greek and Roman poetry, and his revisionist attitude towards his
models, especially Virgil.
New attention given to both the Fasti and the exile poetry, earlier considered
the least successful of Ovid’s works, has shed important light
on the complexity of Ovid’s political balancing act. Barchiesi
(1997), Newlands (1995), and Herbert-Brown (1994) on the Fasti
demonstrate by their very lack of agreement the difficulty of
distinguishing a literary from a political agenda, while also
providing a point of entry into a consideration of the political
underpinnings of Ovid’s career over its almost 40-year span.
This trend complements a growing sense, typified by Williams (1994),
that the exile poetry is something more than the shameless whining of
a political naif.
This talk will be accompanied by a handout
of passages to be discussed and a bibliography of scholarly works,
primarily in English, of value to new and old teachers of Ovid alike.
Abstracts Index | Program