Ovid Underwater: Environmental Dialectics at Achelous’ Banquet
A recent tendency in studies of Metamorphoses draws inspiration from the climate crisis to highlight the uncanniness of the environments described in the poem. Ovidian nature confronts viewers and readers with the limits of human power and identity. This article integrates this approach to the repre...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Université Lille-3
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Dictynna |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/dictynna/3977 |
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| Summary: | A recent tendency in studies of Metamorphoses draws inspiration from the climate crisis to highlight the uncanniness of the environments described in the poem. Ovidian nature confronts viewers and readers with the limits of human power and identity. This article integrates this approach to the represented world of the poem with earlier critical emphases on the work’s narratological complexity. The stark power differentials suggested by the landscape contrast with the uses narrators make of environmental description to negotiate their own status within the specific contexts of narration. This function of narrative as a technique for controlling the environment is explored through close readings of the interlocking tales told at Achelous banquet. The themes of these stories, sacrifice, nurture, and reproduction, as mythical evocations of distinctively human strategies of survival, help anchor narrative itself as a means of exposing and mediating the alterity of the cosmos and suggest a model for understanding Ovid’s own act of narration in political terms. |
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| ISSN: | 1969-4202 1765-3142 |