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Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' Metamorphoses
Nancy Shumate
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Apuleius' wonderful Latin novel Metamorphoses, written in the second century C.E., was for a long time neglected. In recent years some have attempted to understand the Metamorphoses by applying contemporary critical theory to the work, without notable success. In Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" Nancy Shumate takes a new and profitable approach: she uses an epistemologically oriented model of religious conversion to study the experiences of the novel's central character, Lucius, who is turned into an ass and back again.
Shumate draws on a wide range of literary and nonliterary representations of conversion in order to establish a useful theoretical framework. The Metamorphoses is exposed as a text anticipating later narratives in its concern with world-building, with the narrator's subjective reality, and with the invocation and critique of religious experience.
Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" will be of interest to classicists and scholars of Silver Latin and of the increasingly popular ancient novel, as well as to students of psychology and the sociology of religious experience.
Nancy Shumate is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures, Smith College.
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Malraux, the Absolute Agnostic; or, Metamorphosis as Universal Law
Claude Tannery
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Moving beyond merely biographical or textual interpretation, Claude Tannery traces the philosophy of life and art developed by André Malraux. With both sensitivity and expert interpretation he defines the issues—personal and artistic as well as political—that underlie Malraux's writings—including early as well as late works, novels, speeches, and essays. The result is a new and subtle portrait of Malraux.
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Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius
A Study of Allusion in the Novel
Ellen D. Finkelpearl
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Ellen D. Finkelpearl's Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius studies the use of literary allusion by the Roman author Apuleius, in his second century C.E. novel the Metamorphoses, popularly known as The Golden Ass. Apuleius' work is enticing yet frustrating because of its enigmatic mixture of the comic and serious; a young man is transformed into a donkey, but eventually finds salvation with the goddess Isis. Finkelpearl's book represents the first attempt to place Apuleius' allusive practices within a consideration of the development of the ancient novel.
When Apuleius wrote his Metamorphoses, the novel--indeed the very concept of fiction in prose--was new. This study argues that Apuleius' repeated allusions to earlier Latin authors such as Vergil, Ovid, and Seneca represent an exploration on his part of the relationship between the novel and more established genres of the era. Apuleius' struggle with this tradition, Finkelpearl maintains, parallels the protagonist's move from an acceptance of the dominance of traditional forms to a sense of arrival and self- discovery.
An introductory chapter includes general discussion of the theory and practice of allusion. Finkelpearl then revisits the issues of parody in Apuleius. She also includes discussion of Apuleius' use of Vergil's Sinon, the Charite episode in relation to Apuleius' African origins, and the stepmother episode. Finally a new reading of Isis is offered, which emphasizes her associations with writing and matches the multiformity of the goddess with the novel's many voices.
This book will be of interest to scholars of literature and the origins of the novel, multiculturalism, and classical literature.
Ellen D. Finkelpearl is Associate Professor of Classics at Scripps College, Claremont, California.
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Metamorphosis
The Mind in Exile
Harold Skulsky
Harvard University Press, 1981

Fusing the methods of comparative literature, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis, Harold Skulsky explores a motif that has fascinated storytellers since antiquity: the miraculous transformation of a character into a plant, an animal, or a different human being.

The thesis of the study is that the fantasy of metamorphosis challenges the narrator and his audience to confront certain basic anxieties about the human condition: Is the mind reducible to physical properties? What constitutes personhood? How does physical form affect personal identity and continuity of the self?

Testing instances in which these and related perplexities appear in literature, Skulsky systematically and provocatively interprets ten major illustrative texts drawn from diverse epochs and languages, including the works of Homer, Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Dante, Donne, Spenser, Keats, Kafka, and Woolf. Through Skulsky's masterly analysis the victims of metamorphosis in narrative literature--whether werewolf, ass, beetle, swine, or tree--provide a profound insight into the complexities of human experience.

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The Monstered Self
Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction
Eduardo González
Duke University Press, 1992
Viewing stories and novels from an ethnographic perspective, Eduardo González here explores the relationship between myth, ritual, and death in writings by Borges, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Roa Bastos. He then weaves this analysis into a larger cultural fabric composed of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Benjamin, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Poe, and others.
What interests González is the signature of authorial selfhood in narrative and performance, which he finds willfully and temptingly disfigured in the works he examines: horrific and erotic, subservient and tyrannical, charismatic and repellent. Searching out the personal image and plot, González uncovers two fundamental types of narrative: one that strips character of moral choice; and another in which characters' choices deprive them of personal autonomy and hold them in ritual bondage to a group. Thus The Monstered Self becomes a study of the conflict between individual autonomy and the stereotypes of solidarity.
Written in a characteristically allusive, elliptical style, and drawing on psychoanalysis, religion, mythology, and comparative literature, The Monstered Self is in itself a remarkable performance, one that will engage readers in anthropology, psychology, and cultural history as well as those specifically interested in Latin American narrative.
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Ovid's Causes
Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses
K. Sara Myers
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Ovid’s Causes offers a new reassessment of the poet’s longest and most difficult poem, the Metamorphoses. This poem has long been denied epic stature because of its stylistic and thematic diversity. K. Sara Myers demonstrates that the poem must be understood as the inheritor and interpreter of the Roman tradition of cosmological epic. She situates the poem in the traditions and conventions of Roman poetry and considers the ways in which it both fulfills and overturns the expectations of the epic genre.
 
The first and final chapters of this book examine the scientific and cosmological framework of the poem. Ovid’s juxtaposition of scientific and mythological explanations is an aspect of his sophisticated manipulation of truth and fiction, and of the claims of philosophical poetry and mythological poetry.
 
This illuminating study presents much useful material for students of Roman poetry or of Greek literary influences that profoundly influenced its development. Students and scholars of ancient poetical traditions will likewise find much of interest.
 
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The Play of Fictions
Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2
A. M. Keith
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative
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The Pygmalion Effect
From Ovid to Hitchcock
Victor I. Stoichita
University of Chicago Press, 2008
 
Between life and the art that imitates it is a vague, more shadowy category: images that exist autonomously. Pygmalion’s mythical sculpture, which magnanimous gods endowed with life after he fell in love with it, marks perhaps the first such instance in Western art history of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something (or someone) else. In The Pygmalion Effect, Victor I. Stoichita delivers this living image—as well as its many avatars over the centuries—from the long shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality.

Stoichita traces the reverberations of Ovid’s founding myth from ancient times through the advent of cinema. Emphasizing its erotic origins, he locates echoes of this famous fable in everything from legendary incarnations of Helen of Troy to surrealist painting to photographs of both sculpture and people artfully posed to simulate statues. But it was only with the invention of moving pictures, Stoichita argues, that the modern age found a fitting embodiment of the Pygmalion story’s influence. Concluding with an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock films that focuses on Kim Novak’s double persona in Vertigo, The Pygmalion Effect illuminates the fluctuating connections that link aesthetics, magic, and technical skill. In the process, it sheds new light on a mysterious world of living artifacts that, until now, has occupied a dark and little-understood realm in the history of Western image making.
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The Ruins of Allegory
Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention
Catherine Gimelli Martin
Duke University Press, 1998
In this reexamination of the allegorical dimensions of Paradise Lost, Catherine Martin presents Milton’s poem as a prophecy foretelling the end of one culture and its replacement by another. She argues that rather than merely extending the allegorical tradition as defined by Augustine, Dante, and Spenser, Milton has written a meta-allegory that stages a confrontation with an allegorical formalism that is either dead or no longer philosophically viable. By both critiquing and recasting the traditional form, Milton describes the transition to a new epoch that promises the possibility of human redemption in history.
Martin shows how Paradise Lost, written at the threshold of the enormous imaginative shift that accompanied the Protestant, scientific, and political revolutions of the seventeenth century, conforms to a prophetic baroque model of allegory similar to that outlined by Walter Benjamin. As she demonstrates, Milton’s experimentation with baroque forms radically reformulates classical epic, medieval romance, and Spenserian allegory to allow for both a naturalistic, empirically responsible understanding of the universe and for an infinite and incomprehensible God. In this way, the resulting poetic world of Paradise Lost is like Milton’s God, an allegorical “ruin” in which the divine is preserved but at the price of a loss of certainty. Also, as Martin suggests, the poem affirmatively anticipates modernity by placing the chief hope of human progress in the fully self-authored subject.
Maintaining a dialogue with a critical tradition that extends from Johnson and Coleridge to the best contemporary Milton scholarship, Martin sets Paradise Lost in both the early modern and the postmodern worlds. Ruins of Allegory will greatly interest all Milton scholars, as well as students of literary criticism and early modern studies.
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Versions of Pygmalion
J. Hillis Miller
Harvard University Press, 1990

The literary school called “deconstruction” has long been dogged by the charge that it is unprincipled, its doors closed to the larger world of moral and social concern. J. Hillis Miller, one of America’s leading teacher-critics, sets the record straight by looking into a series of fictions that allow him to show that ethics has always been at the heart of deconstructive literary criticism. Miller proves his point not by assertion but by doing—deconstruction is here in the hands of a master teacher.

Miller’s controlling image is Ovid’s Pygmalion, who made a statue that came alive and whose descendants (the incestuous Myrrha, the bloodied Adonis) then had to bear the effects of what he did. All storytellers can be seen as Pygmalions, creating characters (personification) who must then act, choose, and evaluate (what Miller calls the “ethics of narration”). If storytellers must be held accountable for what they create, then so must critics or teachers who have their own stories to tell when they write or discuss stories. If the choices are heavy, they are also, Miller wryly points out, happily unpredictable.

The teacher’s first “ethical act” is the choice of what to teach, and Miller chooses his texts boldly. As an active reader, the kind demanded by deconstruction, Miller refashions each story, another ethical act, an intervention that may have social, political, and historical consequences. He then looks beyond text and critical theory to ask whether writing literature, reading it, teaching it, or writing about it makes anything happen in the real world of material history.

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WEB OF FANTASIES
GAZE, IMAGE, & GENDER IN OVID'S METAMORPHOSES
Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell
The Ohio State University Press, 2005
Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid’s epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid’s constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who “sees” the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation).
     The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid’s epic.
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