Transactions
of the American Philological
Association
Vol. 135, Spring
2005
I. Conference Papers
Lowell Edmunds
Critical Divergences:
New Directions in the Study and Teaching of Roman
Literature
Introduction to seven
papers from the conference Critical Divergences: New
Directions in the Study and Teaching of Roman Literature,
held 24-25 October 2003 at Rutgers University.
James J. O'Hara
Trying Not
To Cheat: Responses to Inconsistencies in Roman
Epic
This paper discusses some of the arguments and
methods of a forthcoming study of inconsistencies in
Roman epic. After description of the shape of that book,
the paper moves through some passages and problems in
Catullus 64, Lucretius' De rerum natura,
Vergil's Aeneid,
Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Lucan's Pharsalia. My central claim is that not all
inconsistencies need to be explained or amended away, or
faulted, and that some need to be interpreted. Some types
of "cheating," or of avoiding reading and interpreting
the words in the text in the order in which they appear,
are discussed.
Michèle Lowrie
Inside
Out: In Defense of Form
Three
case studies show a consistent preoccupation with a
similar formal problem within different areas of inquiry.
The problem is the relation of inside to outside. The
areas are genre criticism, speech act theory, and
sovereignty theory. Genre, an external feature of a text,
is a topic discussed by Roman poets, who can assert their
poetry's power in the world only through poetry. The
sovereign, who is subject to the law, also lies outside
it in his ability to suspend it. In each case, the power
to determine reality and the power to represent it are in
competition. The personal voice in this paper responds to
Lowell Edmunds' questions about methodology.
Stephen Hinds
Defamiliarizing
Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction
In
line with a growing trend to approach classics of Roman
literature as much through their successors as through
their antecedents, this essay offers a pair of
case-studies in the post-antique reception of Cicero and
Ovid. With an eye to the brief of the present volume,
each case-study moves towards a crux locatable in the
last decade, trying to show that our characteristic ways
of interpreting a Latin author are implicated in changing
ideas about the so-called "Classical Tradition" inside
and outside the academy. The first part of the essay
offers snapshots of the "Ciceronian man" from Petrarch to
the present day; the second considers a new Ovidianism
outside the academy, which has yielded a surprising range
of re-readings of the Metamorphoses
since the early 1990s.
Thomas
Habinek
Latin
Literature between Text and Practice
This
paper contains an appeal to situate the study of Latin
literature within a history of embodied practices. Art
history, anthropology, and cognitive science can all
contribute to a decentering of texts and textuality, and
texts can be analyzed for their role in the organization
of human beings' capacity for mimesis. Latin literature
is a case study of the ongoing relationship between
embodiment and symbolization.
Joseph
Farrell
Joy Connolly
Border
Wars: Literature, Politics, and the Public
Approaching
Latin along the border line dividing the academic
humanities from public discourse, this essay explores the
possibility of articulating a publicly responsible
practice of Latin literary studies. I suggest that the
current eclecticism in literary studies serves the
project of democratic criticism at a time when the
traditional raison d'être
of the university as the preserver of Euro-American
culture is in decline. Next I draw on my current work on
the republican tradition in literature and political
thought, focusing on translations of Vergil by the
17th-century theorist James Harrington. The study of
reception is a crucial part of renewing Latin studies for
the new world, I suggest, because it reveals the role of
Latin literature in shaping modern conceptions of the
political, the aesthetic, and the relation between the
two. Concluding, I turn briefly to Cicero, whose blurring
of the political and the aesthetic calls into question
our habits of thinking about the transition from Republic
and Empire.
Alessandro Barchiesi
Lane-switching
and Jughandles in Contemporary Interpretations of Roman
Poetry
My
paper answers two of the conference organizer's
questions: the first, what are you working on,
by mentioning some difficulties I am having with my
current research, the important related question, how
does your approach differ from what it was ten years
ago, by discussing some problems of
interpretation that demonstrate a need to connect formal
and textual with historical and material aspects of Roman
culture. My six examples feature (1) the need for
interdisciplinary discussion, (2) the significance of an
intertextuality that is not demonstrably "causative," (3)
the importance of taking seriously "literal" indications
such as location and (4) architecture, (5 and 6) the use
of deictics and numerology as pointers to, respectively,
the economy of patronage and the agenda of Augustan
ideology.
II. Papers
Gwendolyn Compton-Engle
Stolen
Cloaks in Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae
I
argue that the cloaks that the women steal from their
husbands in Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae have thematic resonances that extend well
beyond their use as part of the women's transvestite
disguise. The filching of the cloaks is portrayed as lôpodusia ("mugging") by
Blepyrus at lines 535–38.
Once he makes this association, the cloaks come to
signify not only gender reversal but also the oikos-polis
dialectic and socioeconomic issues that are at the play's
core. Praxagora capitalizes on these associations as she
presents her agenda to Blepyrus. The stolen cloaks thus
link the cross-dressing and economic aspects of the
play.
David M. Johnson
Persians
As Centaurs in Xenophon's Cyropaedia
Cyrus
depends on the traditional virtues of the Persians, but
must introduce a new understanding of virtue to make them
an imperial people, coupling Median luxury with Persian
restraint. The collapse of this unstable combination
immediately following Cyrus' death is therefore natural
enough. The Cyropaedia is thus a guide both to how to found an
empire and to why not to found an empire.