Classical Literature and Philology Commons^™

Argo Navis: A Drifting Circumambulation, Kyle D. Lemstrom

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This work is a tongue-in-cheek narrative journey through the creative process, using travel and mythology as vehicles for reflection, metacognition, and critical thinking around philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. As a process-oriented piece, it makes use of intentional constraints to force a kind of unfolding, to mimic the act of intellectual discovery, navigating dissonance and doubt. As a creative product, it is something akin to an afterimage, to persist as a vestige of accumulated learning. The piece wrestles with questions of personal agency, authority, knowledge and meaning, yet does not arrive at definitive answers.

'Furor' As Failed 'Pietas': Roman Poetic Constructions Of Madness Through The Time Of Virgil, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Roman poetic portrayals of mad characters through the time of Virgil construct a fundamental opposition between madness, an ipso facto self-absorbed or egoistic condition, and sanity, which duly fixes its gaze outside of itself, on parents, forebears, and the walls of state. The poets conceptualize furor less as what a modern sensibility would label insanity or mental illness than as a passion-fueled state antithetical to social order, able to be held in check only by rigorous adherence to the duty-oriented cultural code of pietas. In this moralized conception of madness, erotic furor is not a metaphorical by-path but a …

Romance And Reason: Contextualizing The Arthurian Romances Of Chrétien De Troyes, Alexandra Borkowski

Graduate History Conference, UMass Boston

The twelfth century saw the birth of the romance in literature, as well as the intellectual and social developments of humanism. The romance often involved the adventures of the knight, focusing on the behavior of the knight using the ideals of courtly love and chivalry. Chrétien de Troyes (c.1135-c.1183) contributed to the discussion of chivalry and courtliness by writing narrative poetry involving the Arthurian legends. He focused on the consequences of his knightly characters’ choices in order to show examples of how a proper knight should behave. This emphasis on the choices of each knight conveys a humanistic perspective, which …

Frazier Polymetis: Cold Mountain And The Odyssey, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Ever since its appearance in 1997, Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain, has been billed as a latter-day Odyssey. Separate unattributed book notes on the world wide web speak of its protagonist’s “dangerous odyssey” and his “odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South.” One reviewer styles the novel "a Confederate deserter's homeward odyssey"; another characterizes it as having “reset much of the 'Odyssey' in 19th-century America.” While such assertion of parallelism between the novel and Homer’s epic is widespread, it also tends to remain general and relatively unadorned. It evidently rests on such typically odyssean plot elements …

Homer, Pietas, And The Cycle Of Duels In Aeneid 10 And 12, Randall Colaizzi

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Readers who encounter the Aeneid today often face an abridgement meant to fit the demands of a college literature survey: Troy, anderings, Dido, the Underworld-the exotic Odyssean Aeneid of the first six books. The poem's second half, if read at all, might offer only scenes from book 8 (etiology and shield), Nisus and Euryalus from book 9, sometimes Camilla in book 11, Turnus's death at the end of the poem. But since the first cut in such selections usually includes most of the warfare, Vergil's subtlety (and difficulty) can be misunderstood, especially if the poem's close is to be considered. …

Euripides' Second Thoughts, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Euripides' extant Hippolytus was a rare "re-production" of an earlier play on the same mythic episode. The play contains a series of metadramatic comments on its partial interchange of Phaedra's and the Nurse's original roles. The Nurse's appearance in the "Stephanias" as seducer of a virtuous Phaedra is presented as a "change of mind." Her "second thoughts" (to corrupt, rather than dissuade Phaedra) mirror the playwright's decision to amend a shameless Phaedra's character by, conversely, degenerating the Nurse's. His covert comments on this strategy of reversal underline the oddity of his decision to correct his first try at the story.

Every Man's An Odysseus: An Analysis Of The Nostos-Theme In Corelli's Mandolin, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

In the sparkling first chapter of Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin, the world of Homer's Odysseus is explicitly invoked. This is hardly surprising in a historical novel which will detail the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia, near neighbor of Odysseus's Ithaca, during World War II. What is less immediately apparent is that the novel contains a further pattern of inexplicit allusion to the Odyssey, along with a pervasive theme of nostos. Emphasis on "homecoming" helps create the novel's ardent encomium to the Greek homeland that inspires such fierce love of place in its people …

Double Meaning And Mythic Novelty In Euripides' Plays, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

The mythic tradition of dle Greeks is protean. Each of the vast number of stories is itself variable, appearing now in one form, now in another, often standing alongside other versions which it flatly contradicts. Critical study of this remarkable tradition is doubly vexed, firSt by received myth's intrinsically fluid nature, then by the fragmentary preservation of mythic source material.

Medea Line 37: A Note, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

A recent article by R. P. Winnington-Ingram elucidates Euripides' penchant for clever "jokes" at the expense of the literary traditions or the stage conventions within which he worked. While Winnington-Ingram voices some trepidation that other critics may find his identification of such levity in a great tragedian "repugnant or even abhorrent," his assessment of these witticisms, which (in a play on the word's current and etymological meanings) he dubs "sophisticated," has offered insight into Euripides' artistry and inspired further study along similar lines, notably by Geoffrey Amott.

A keynote of the examples of cleverness noted by these scholars is their …

Horace, Maecenas And Odes 2.17, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Few of Horace's Odes have occasioned as little recent critical commentary as his poetic pledge to die along with Maecenas. Although a profitable direction for analysis was indicated by Meineke's outraged condemnation of the fourth stanza and PEERLKAMP'S even earlier obelization of a full five of the poem's eight stanzas, the road most commonly taken by critics has been to ignore this ode altogether, or to mention it in passing only. Of the most recent studies on Horace, only FRAENKEL and (necessarily) NISBET and HUBBARD'S exhaustive commentary on Odes II meet the poem head on.

Critics' difficulties with the ode …

Greek And Roman Elements In Horace's Lyric Program, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

The vision of Horatian scholars into the nature of Horace's 'Odes' has for many years been obscured by a number of disputes concerning both his use of Greek literary models, classical and Alexandrian, and his poetic judgment of his Latin predecessors and contemporaries, the neoterics and elegists. It is ironic (though the eclectic Horace might well have found it amusing) that one of the first self-proclaimed literary critics of the Western tradition has left posterity in such doubt about where precisely he himself, as poet, fits into the trends and currents of literary history.

Horatius Callidus, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

When Horace turned from Sermones and Epodes to the composition of lyrics, the task that he set himself was a complex one. Like Virgil, Horace accepted wholeheartedly the poetic ideals of careful craftsmanship and sophistication advocated by Callimachus and the Alexandrians and first represented in Rome by Catullus, Calvus and Cinna. Nevertheless, the Alexandrian and neoteric programs were not enough for Horace and Virgil: both were deeply affected by the times in which they lived and were therefore determined to deal with contemporary affairs in their poetry. This determination eventually led Virgil to the "impossible" task of adapting the classical …