Writing from the margins: death and Dionysiac renewal in Tristia 5.3
By Cynthia Liu (University of Oxford)
Ovid’s Tristia manipulates temporal and spatial distances in its exilic strategies. In many poems the poet evokes death in his descriptions of Tomis, placing himself in the underworld and attempting, through poetry, to move from death to the living world. I suggest that this reversal of the poetic-katabasis trope, famously attached to Orpheus, takes on a Dionysiac-mystic tone in Tr. 5.3, which employs mystic-ritual strategies and dithyrambic characteristics to comment on both Ovid’s death-like position and his poetic activity.
Weaving an Archive: Ovid Metamorphoses VI and Rogue Archives of Power
By Jermaine R.G. Bryant (Princeton University)
The first and last major narratives of Metamorphoses VI feature women depicting rape through tapestries: Arachne portrays eighteen of the gods’ infamous encounters and Philomela relates her experience of rape by her brother-in-law, Tereus. Both women create physical documents of sexual violence and weave transgressive narratives that threaten established hierarchy.
Posse loqui eripitur: Trauma and resilience in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
By Miriam Kamil (Hamilton College)
(Content Warning: This paper contains detailed discussion of sexual violence and trauma)
Ovid’s Godless Storm: An Ecocritical Reappraisal of the Ceyx and Alcyone Episode
By Erica Krause (University of Virginia)
The goal of this paper is to explore the relationship between humans and nonhumans, i.e., between people and their environment, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by analyzing the Ceyx and Alcyone storm scene as an ecological parable (Met. 11.444-572). This idea comes from ecocritical scholar Steve Mentz, who argues that all literary shipwrecks are metaphors “for the conflict between human bodies and nonhuman power” (Mentz xxv).