The Face of Nature (ebook)

Argumento de The Face of Nature (ebook)

In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Meta-morphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other element of Ovid's art.

In the first chapter, Tissol argues that verbal wit and wordplay are closely linked to Ovidian metamorphoses. Wit challenges the ordinary conceptual categories of Ovid's readers, disturbing and extending the meanings and references of words. Thereby it contributes on the stylistic level to the readers' apprehension of flux. On a larger scale, parallel disturbances occur in the progress of narratives. In the second and third chapters, the author examines surprise and abrupt alteration of perspective as important features of narrative style. We experience reading as a transformative process not only in the characteristic indirection and unpredictability of Ovid's narrative but also in the memory of his predecessors. In the fourth chapter, Tissol shows how Ovid subsumes Vergil's Aeneid into the Metamorphoses in an especially rich allusive exploitation, one which contrasts Vergil's aetiological themes with those of his own work.

Originally published in 1997.

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"This book makes the first sustained argument (and a convincing one at that) for thematic significance of the poem's characteristic stylistic and narrative features. There are many excellent analyses of the designed instability of Ovid's text in general and Ovid's narrative indirection and downright deception in particular. I know of nothing comparable on this poem."--John F. Miller, University of Virginia0Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 3 Ch. 1 Glittering Trifles: Verbal Wit and Physical Transformation 11 Transgressive Language: Narcissus and Althea 11 Indecorous and Transformative Puns 22 Misunderstanding aura: Cephalus, Procris, and the Pun 26 Divinatory Wordplay: The Pun Overheard 30 Vox non intellecta: Irony and Metamorphic Wordplay (Myrrha) 36 Littera scripta manet - Or Does It? (Byblis) 42 Self-Cancelling and Self-Objectifying Witticisms 52 Wordplay, Personification, and Phantasia 61 True Imitation: Ceyx, Alcyone, and Morpheus 72 The House of Reception 85 Ch. 2 The Ass's Shadow: Narrative Disruption and Its Consequences 89 Some Exemplary Interruptions 89 Daedalus and Perdix 97 Cyclopean Violence and Narrative Disruption 105 Some Scandalous Passages 124 Ch. 3 Disruptive Traditions 131 Indecorous Possibilities: Callimachus's Hymn to Artemis and Ovidian Style 131 Elegiac Contributions: Propertius's Tarpeia and Ovid's Scylla 143 Epic Distortions: The Hecale in the Metamorphoses 153 Ch. 4 Deeper Causes: Aetiology and Style 167 Aetiological Wordplay 167 Ovid's Little Aeneid 177 Aetiology and the Nature of Flux 191 Conclusion 215 App. A G. J. Vossius on Syllepsis oratoria 217 App. B Syllepsis and Zeugma 219 App. C Further Examples of Syllepsis in Ovid 221 References 223 Index locorum 231 Index 235