Unhistorical Receptions of Ancient Narrative

The 2012 publication of Alice Oswald’s “Memorial” in America met with a mixed reception: while NPR’s Alan Cheuse rated it among the five best books in fiction and poetry of the year, the reviews by Peter Green for the New Republic and by William Logan for the New York Times were rather negative. In my opinion, the poem richly rewards attention, especially from readers who are trained in the Classics.

In an important article, Valerie Traub recently assessed ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’ which, she argues, has gone too far in aligning (if not conflating) chronology, genealogy, teleology and ‘straight temporality’ in an attempt to free itself from ‘a lingering attachment to identity that unduly stabilizes sexuality and recruits earlier sexual regimes into a lockstep march toward the present … and through a kind of reverse contamination conscripts past sexual arrangements to modern categories’ (Traub 2013: 24).

James Joyce's literary debt to Ovid's Metamorphoses is unquestionable. Having first encountered the Metamorphoses as part of his studies at Belvedere College, he used a line from that work as the epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: et ignotas animum dimittit in artes (Met. 8.188).

In the “Cyclops” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the character known as “the citizen” hears that a Dublin mayoral candidate has been meeting with the Irish Cattle Traders and reacts with an unusual oath: “Hairy Iopas, says the citizen” (Ulysses 12.829). It is difficult to see how Virgil’s crinitus Iopas (Aeneid 1.740), the bard in Dido’s court, is relevant to the scene in Ulysses, which draws on the Hercules and Cacus episode of Aeneid 8 rather than Dido’s court in Aeneid 1 (Schork 1997, 132-33).