Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Problem of Ecopoetics
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Classics
Abstract
In the context of a broad 'posthuman' movement in the Classics, scholars are starting to ask what ancient poets have to say about the non-human environment (Schliephake 2017; Armstrong 2019; The Postclassicisms Collective 2019; Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes 2019; Porter 2019). A conference on 'Metamorphosis and the Environmental Imagination' (UCLA 2019), to become a volume in Bloomsbury's Ancient Environment series, showcases a variety of ecocritical approaches to Metamorphoses, from a reimagining of Phaethon in light of the climate crisis to a consideration of affinities between people and trees (see also Gowers 2005). Francesca Martelli (2020), too, anticipates that a range of ecological thought will provide an important new direction for criticism on Metamorphoses. Martindale (1997, 109-10), however, has suggested that the character of environmental activism is at odds with the self-reflexiveness and playful irony of literature in the Hellenistic tradition. Moreover, despite blurring boundaries between 'Man and Nature', the world-view of Metamorphoses has been characterised as fundamentally anthropocentric (Gildenhard and Zissos 2013, 68-72; Sissa 2019), whereas ecological thought tries to level human with non-human.
I aim to provide a way forward by viewing Metamorphoses less as an exposition of an ecological philosophy and more as a confrontation of the problem of talking about the nonhuman through poetry. Ovid makes the important choice of having characters lose the power of speech along with human form, raising the possibility that their new experience of reality is inaccessible to the poet's verbal art. When Daphne becomes the laurel, for example, she seems to give mute assent to Apollo's prophecies by shaking her boughs. Callimachus in Iamb. 4, however, had presented a laurel shaking its boughs in indignation during a fully articulate
argument with an olive tree (Kerkhecker 1999, 86-87), suggesting that quite a different emotion might lie behind the laurel's gesture in Metamorphoses. In Ovid's version, Daphne has crossed over into tree world: her intentions are unknowable and anthropomorphic Apollo, god and paradigm of poets, distorts her inscrutable communication (if it can be called that) for his own ends.
Current ecological writers also face the problem of moving beyond the human perspective using human modes of expression. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2013; 2015), Donna Haraway (2016), and Timothy Morton (2016; 2018) respond to this difficulty by producing work characterised by a penchant for heterogeneity; an inscrutable, semi-flippant attitude; an attraction to paradox; and the avoidance of satisfying conclusions. These are well-established features of the authorial voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses but their relevance to ecocriticism has gone unappreciated, given that previous critics have focused on what the poet says about the environment rather than how he goes about saying it. My research will account for why Ovid's subversive poetics seem to place him at the cutting edge of ecological thought, and explore how the work might have conjured thoughts that we would call 'ecological' in its contemporary Roman readership.
Beyond Metamorphoses, this project suggests future avenues of investigation into the agency of objects and the poems about them in Latin poetry.
I aim to provide a way forward by viewing Metamorphoses less as an exposition of an ecological philosophy and more as a confrontation of the problem of talking about the nonhuman through poetry. Ovid makes the important choice of having characters lose the power of speech along with human form, raising the possibility that their new experience of reality is inaccessible to the poet's verbal art. When Daphne becomes the laurel, for example, she seems to give mute assent to Apollo's prophecies by shaking her boughs. Callimachus in Iamb. 4, however, had presented a laurel shaking its boughs in indignation during a fully articulate
argument with an olive tree (Kerkhecker 1999, 86-87), suggesting that quite a different emotion might lie behind the laurel's gesture in Metamorphoses. In Ovid's version, Daphne has crossed over into tree world: her intentions are unknowable and anthropomorphic Apollo, god and paradigm of poets, distorts her inscrutable communication (if it can be called that) for his own ends.
Current ecological writers also face the problem of moving beyond the human perspective using human modes of expression. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2013; 2015), Donna Haraway (2016), and Timothy Morton (2016; 2018) respond to this difficulty by producing work characterised by a penchant for heterogeneity; an inscrutable, semi-flippant attitude; an attraction to paradox; and the avoidance of satisfying conclusions. These are well-established features of the authorial voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses but their relevance to ecocriticism has gone unappreciated, given that previous critics have focused on what the poet says about the environment rather than how he goes about saying it. My research will account for why Ovid's subversive poetics seem to place him at the cutting edge of ecological thought, and explore how the work might have conjured thoughts that we would call 'ecological' in its contemporary Roman readership.
Beyond Metamorphoses, this project suggests future avenues of investigation into the agency of objects and the poems about them in Latin poetry.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Emily Gowers (Primary Supervisor) | |
| William Freeman (Student) |