What's New in Ovidian Studies?

This paper might be considered a continuation of Daniel Libatique’s excellent discussion in San Diego of “Ovid in the #MeToo Era,” (a connection that is resonating e.g. Colby and Barker), but my paper most relates to his close-reading of Ovid’s Philomela episode. My own work probes some of the same issues and hopes to get them in front of audiences who may not know Ovid, or may only know him from other popularizations of his work.

Exploring the reception of Ovid’s exilic elegies in the late poetry of Edmund Spenser, who “knew Ovid so intimately that to write poetry was to use him,” this paper employs recent scholarship on Ovid’s self-reception in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto to reread Spenser’s intertextual engagement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the retroactive light of Ovid’s transformative relegation (Holahan 1990).

At the International Ovidian Society’s inaugural panel, “Ovid Studies: The Next Millennium,” Sara Myers presented an overview of current trends in Ovidian scholarship. Among the promising avenues for further research that she outlined were imperial receptions of Ovid and the application of gender and sexuality studies to Ovid’s poetry. The panel more broadly addressed Ovidian reception (Newlands and Keith), and concluded with a consideration of Ovid’s Philomela episode in relation to the accounts of survivors in the #MeToo movement (Libatique).

In this project, I employ an artificial neural network (ANN) to analyze the relationship between dictional choices and emotional expressions in Ovid’s epistolary poems (Tristia, Epistulae Ex Ponto, and Heroides). Using sentiments as the contextualizing criteria, I perform a comprehensive analysis of the semantic and stylistic changes in Ovid’s exilic poetry as compared to his early works.

In this paper, I present a new approach to analyzing Ovidian intervention in public discourses of power: a study undertaken at the level of the individual word, where an unprecedented semantic shift originating in Ovid’s corpus provides evidence of the poet’s active engagement with contemporary political and cultural anxieties about women’s bodies and fertility.

This paper investigates the anorexic poetics in Ovid’s account of Ceres and Proserpina (Met. 5, 341-571; Fast. 4, 393-676). Proserpina’s myth exemplifies the narrow relationship between two psychosomatic phenomena, concisely symbolized by the highly eroticized motive of the pomegranate (Arthur 1994: 237): food and sexuality – and their denial. This tension is also at the core of modern eating disorders such as anorexia.