Ovid in the Global Village: Interconnectivity and Alienation in Ovidian Studies

Ovid is the definitive poet of Rome. Many of his works express, in one form or another, the strong ‘gravitational pull’ of the city. In his early erotic works, the city is the setting; the Ars Amatoria, for example, means nothing without Rome as its backdrop. In the Metamorphoses the inexorable direction of travel is towards Rome, and as Ovid meanders from myth to myth, we are pulled closer and closer to the city.

Interrupted (according to Ovid) by his exile, the fasti abruptly break off halfway through the calendar, a monument to the fracturing effects of Augustan imperialism: for Ovid presents his spatial dislocation from Rome to the Black Sea as coinciding with the fragmentation of his portrait of the cosmically complete religious year (Feeney 1992).

In this paper, I will explore the particular logics of Ovidian metamorphoses centering (de)animation and (in)animacy, bodily and environmental instability, and the use of ars or techne that inform the choreographies and production designs of (post)modern dancers like Loie Fuller, Jodie Sperling, and Kinetic Light.

The influence and reception of Ovid’s works spans many world literatures from South America to China (Miller and Newlands 2014; Liu 2021). However, one area that remains to be fully explored is Ovid’s reception in the work of Bosnian authors, which may be said to represent a sort of continuation of Ovid’s exile in the Balkans.