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Latin 910: Interpreting Ovid's Metamorphoses : New directions and reception

C. Newlands, Spring Semester 2005-2006, Wed. 4pm

This seminar will examine Ovid's Metamorphoses and their afterlife in Medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary culture.

Perhaps no other classical text has proved its versatility so much as Ovid' epic poem. The twelfth century ushered in an age that critics call the Aetas Ovidiana, �the Age of Ovid,' so widespread was study of Ovid's poetry, particularly the Metamorphoses, and so pervasive was Ovid's influence on the idea of courtly love and on medieval literature. Writers such as John Gower, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, to name only a few, owe a profound debt to Ovid. Even in the twentieth century Ovid's epic has attracted modern poets and writers, for instance Ted Hughes' award winning Tales from Ovid, the collection of poetry After Ovid, and many European novels, most notably perhaps Ransmayr's Die Letzte Welt .

In scholarly circles Ovid fell into disfavour in the Romantic period, regarded as a flippant and immoral poet. But a recent renascence of interest in Ovid has re-established the Metamorphoses as a major epic, not just in the canon of Roman poetry but in the Western literary and artistic tradition. Recent scholarship on the poem, disseminated in three major collections of essays--- Ovidian Transformations (Cambridge 1999), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge 2002), and The Brill Companion to Ovid (Leiden 2002)�and in other major books, has pushed critical understanding of the poem in provocative and fruitful new directions. At the same time, Ovid's Metamorphoses has retained its popular appeal; Mary Zimmerman's play Metamorphosis attracted full audiences in New York after 9/11, a sign of the poem's enduring and transformative attraction, as each generation appropriates the poem and interprets it according to its specific social and political conditions.

The seminar will be divided into two parts. In the first half of the spring semester we will read the entire poem, either in the original or in translation (depending on knowledge of Latin). Drawing on recent scholarship on the poem, we will discuss some of the critical issues raised by the poem, issues involving genre, gender, the aestheticisation of violence, Roman politics, the role of wit and word play, the complex meaning of �metamorphosis.' Students will be expected to report on scholarship on the poem.

The second half of the seminar will be devoted to reception. In addition to reading and discussing certain key works---excerpts from the Ovide Moralisé, C. Ransmayer's novel Lost World/Die Letzte Welt and the collection of poetry After Ovid, students will work on their papers on the reception of Ovid's poem and will present reports on their work. We will also look at the influence of the Metamorphoses upon the visual arts.

Interested students can look at the volumes mentioned above and also at two recent works on the reception of Ovid's poem: T. Ziolkowski, Ovid and The Moderns (Cornell University Press 2005) and S. A. Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid from Chaucer to Ted Hughes (Duckworth Press 1999/2002).

The professor, C. Newlands, can be contacted at

The course is designed for students with and without a reading knowledge of the Latin language.