Apr 16
Candidate Talk: Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics
Please join the Classics Department in LDC 104, from 5 to 6 pm, to listen to a candidate talk for the Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics position titled, "Antagonizing Fathers: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13 and the Poetic Legacy of Tragedy".
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ajax and Ulysses advance their claims to Achilles’ arms by enumerating their identities and family histories (Met. 13. 22-34 and 140-58). The rhetorical aspects of these speeches have inspired much scholarly debate, especially given the broader engagement of the carmen perpetuum with tragedy. This talk analyzes the echoes of two Sophoclean plays in these speeches, demonstrating that thematic insistence on father-son bonds enables Ovid to
establish himself as a poetic “heir.” Through Ajax’s and Ulysses’ discussions of biological kinship, Ovid situates himself as the legitimate successor of a literary inheritance.
In introducing the heroes as an extension of their ancestors and embedding their inherited qualities with questions of authorship and mythmaking, Ovid not only displays the learned quality of his poesis, but also entangles his carmen perpetuum in tragic discourses about inheritance and storytelling.
from Classics