Representing Ovid Seminar SAA 2016 Large Group Questions. Douglas H. Arrell University of Winnipeg

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1 Representing Ovid Seminar SAA 2016 Large Group Questions Douglas H. Arrell University of Winnipeg The nature of Ovid s portrayal of women clearly is an issue in many of the papers, and there is some uncertainty as to how we should characterize it. Was Ovid a proto-feminist, or was he merely catering to male fantasies of rape and female suffering? Or can we characterise his portrayals of women in a more nuanced way? How Ovidian is the Philomela story? Stories that are very frequently referred to and are found in many sources may lose their associations with Ovid and simply become part of the poetic vocabulary of early modern literature. Few references to Philomena remind us of the terrible revenge the sisters took on Tereus. Has the Ovidian context been forgotten, or even never known, by many who use this and other familiar images that have their origins in Ovid? Clearly the Philomela and Actaeon stories are the most cited in these papers. Does this fact reflect their importance in early modern drama or the preoccupations of contemporary literary critics? Jim Casey Arcadia University Cupid is a trouble-maker in Ovid (often acting on directions from his mother); he actively or metaphorically causes a tremendous amount of pain and suffering in the Metamorphoses. How does Shakespeare use Ovidian Cupid/love in relation to transformation, trauma, and trouble? The etymological basis for the word Chaos at the beginning of the Metamorphoses is the Greek word khaos, which is seen as a gaping maw, an abyss, that which gapes wide open, vast and empty. Ovid contrasts primordial Khaos with the ordered Kosmos, but the transformations in his tales often subvert or controvert physical and metaphysical notions of order. How does Shakespeare use Ovid in relation to Chaos and Order? Are Ovidian transformations creative and generative or are they repressive and destructive? Chaos question, part two: the gaping maw of Chaos can be read as either a yawn or a scream suggesting that the universe was born either out of boredom or out of terror. Adjusting this slightly, would we say that Shakespeare employs Ovid more in the service of the ridiculous or of the horrific? Eric L. De Barros Clark University Might we explore Ovidian representation, translation, or appropriation (textual as well as dramatic or performative) in terms of various temporalities: such as, clock time or historical time?

2 What are we to make of the centrality of Ovid in the grammar-school curriculum, and specifically, if at all possible, the socio-psychological effects of his violent and/or erotic narratives on early modern schoolboys? I have long understood Lavinia chasing down Young Lucius for his copy of Ovid s Metamorphoses in 4.1 of Titus as representing the traumatic nightmare of early modern education. In the context of religious opposition to Ovidian poetry and classical literature in general, might we think of representation, translation, and appropriation in terms of subtle and/or complex forms of censorship? Might this help us analyze these processes vis-à-vis present-day visual media, such as film as well as electronic devices? Jennifer Feather University of North Carolina at Greensboro Several of these essays analyze how Ovid and Ovidianism engage misogyny but also how they might serve to critique masculinity. What is at stake in shifting the focus from female experiences, especially female experiences of suffering, to male experiences? Appropriately for a seminar at SAA, most of our essays deal with drama in some form, but only a few specifically discuss that our primary acquaintance with Ovid is through poetry rather than through drama. How does staging influence our understanding of Ovid s poetry? Of course, Titus Andronicus looms large in the critical conversations around both Ovid and around early modern England as a nascent empire, but how does Ovid s experience as an imperial subject reverberate beyond Titus explicit preoccupation with these issues? Cora Fox Arizona State University Our papers continue to elucidate the various and complex ways Ovid s works inflected definitions of gender and sexuality in the Renaissance literature that is our focus. Should we be bold and claim that the period itself is defined by an Ovidian sense of gender or an Ovidian gender politics? Or are we finding what we expect to find? How central is Ovidian femininity or masculinity to the lived experience of gender in the period? Can we outline a general distinction between the Ovidianism of popular literature such Heywood s Ages plays and elite literature such as Spenser s Faerie Queene? Should we make this distinction to begin with? This is an old question, but still a good one. Should allusions to Ovidian stories be read as engagements with classical myths, classicism (as Barkan defines it), or the literary works of Ovid?

3 Edward Gieskes University of South Carolina The papers in the seminar demonstrate how Ovid s corpus provides source material whether directly or indirectly for work across multiple dramatic genres like tragedy and romance. What does this range of appropriations tell us about the representation of Ovid and about Ovidian representations in early modern literature? I am interested in talking further about the matter of just what kind of model Ovid was for early modern writers. If Vergil served as a notional model for a writer s career, one at least arguably imitated by some writers, what kind of model was Ovid s career? Since we have papers about a variety of playwrights in the seminar, it would be interesting to talk about commonalities as well as divergences in their various deployments of Ovid s materials. Are there more commonalities than differences? How are the differences mediated? For me, the role of Marlowe s translations seems crucial to this question. How much might different reactions to Marlowe relate to different reactions to Ovid? Heather James University of Southern California I am struck that all of our papers are concerned to identify sites of cultural productivity either healing value in sacrifice and suffering (Jim and Catherine) or the sense of Ovid as presenting liberating alternatives through imaginative boldness (Chris and Heather) in plays that represent the difficulty of changing cultural scripts. It is unsurprising, given the conventions of criticism and critical methodology, that we locate these sites of productivity in very different aspects of the play(s). And yet the sense of our papers, if they are taken as a kind of dialogue, is that Shakespeare writes with a sense of the future, in which the theater is involved in productive changes that remain to take clear or settled form. This, at any rate, is how I see our implicit conversation at present. My question is in part this: is it right to say that the model for change begins in the play(s) and their relation to Shakespeare s beloved authority on change, Ovid? And if this is the case, how do we wish to cast the roles played by differing and sometimes rivalrous kinds of criticism? Sarah K. Scott Mount St. Mary's University Given the range of scholarly discussion, how might we describe the present state of Ovidian scholarship as it relates to renaissance drama? What new directions appear to be emerging? Why? How might we describe Ovid s influence in the English dramatic tradition beyond the early modern years? Is he just as relevant to, say, Caroline and Carolean drama? Does his influence fade? Is it reinvented and repurposed?

4 How do we articulate the treatment of women in Ovid s writings as they are passed to us through translators and dramatists? How do we explain this to those we teach? John Staines John Jay College, CUNY How do different generations (ancient, medieval, early modern, contemporary) read Ovid and his women? As a misogynist or as a feminist text? As morally, ethically, politically, or even psychologically dangerous? And how do those readings, misreadings, and rereadings reveal something about those generations anxieties about women, men, sexuality, and patriarchy? When Renaissance writers invoke Ovid, who or what are they invoking? A figure for the poet, for the lover, for men in general? Are they invoking Ovid s actual poems, or the myths they retell? Where are the Renaissance women readers of Ovidianism, the Britomarts experiencing and reacting to Ovidian tapestries? Does Ovid s place in the classroom make him inevitably a schoolboy s fantasy? M. L. Stapleton Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne Many who have written about Ovid in English literature have been sketchy about which editions of texts and translations our writers actually read. Why? Though the Metamorphoses remains the Ovidian intertext of choice, is it likely that other works will get their due in mainstream literary study? Evidence suggests that even writers as learned in Latin as Spenser nevertheless made liberal use of translations just as Shakespeare obviously did. Why has there been resistance to this concept in comparative literary study? William W. Weber Centre College How many Ovids can we and do we want to identify? Should Ovid as mediated by Marlowe be distinct from Ovid as mediated by Petrarch, Caxton, the L Ovide Moralisé, grammar school curricula, Golding, etc? At what point are traditionally renaissance interpretations of poets returning to the unadulterated classical source a fiction, or a necessity? Are there discernible differences in Ovidian artistry depending on the genre or form? Are there greater distinctions among authors within the epyllia form, or between an individual author s approach to Ovid in an epyllion versus a comedy or tragedy? Is Titus Andronicus having a moment or what? Why is this long-disparaged play so captivating at this moment in time?

5 Catherine Winiarski California State University, Fullerton What is the relationship of Ovidian affect (sympathy, awe, rapture) to Christian affect (as expressed by saints and martyrs, for example?), especially as it might be staged in drama (e.g., in the characters of Lavinia, Hermione, or Paulina)? Is there specifically *pagan* affect to be discovered in Ovid, especially in relation to the sublime? For English Renaissance dramatists, especially Shakespeare, how might Ovidian metamorphosis relate to Christian incarnation, resurrection, mystical incorporation, sacrifice, and/or eucharist ( medicinal cannibalism?), as seen in plays like Titus Andronicus and The Winter s Tale? What role do Ovidian types (the romantic, the libertine, the misogynist) play within dramatized narratives of reformed Christianity?