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In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE). Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.
The first in-depth examination of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius' Metamorphoses
Argues that invisibility is a central motif in Apuleius' Metamorphoses, presenting a new interpretation of this Latin masterpiece.
Trans/formations is a new addition to "SCM's Controversies in Contextual Theology" series. Like anything coming from Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, it is controversial and challenging as well as highly original. The book will: make visible a range of trans lived experience [transgendered and transsexual], offer theological reflection on these experiences, create challenging theology from this experiential base, and provide a resource for churches and theology students not to date available. It includes an excellent range of contributors, including Elizabeth Stuart and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is a valuable addition to reading lists of courses on religion, gender and the body.
From the bites and scratches of lovers and the threat of flogging that hangs over the comic slave, to murder, rape, dismemberment, and crucifixion, violence is everywhere in Latin literature. The contributors to this volume explore the manifold ways in which violence is constructed and represented in Latin poetry and prose from Plautus to Prudentius, examining the interrelations between violence, language, power, and gender, and the narrative, rhetorical, and ideological functions of such depictions across the generic spectrum. How does violence contribute to the pleasure of the text? Do depictions of violence always reinforce status-hierarchies, or can they provoke a reassessment of normative value-systems? Is the reader necessarily complicit with authorial constructions of violence? These are pressing questions both for ancient literature and for film and other modern media, and this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural studies as well as of the ancient world.
Current interpretations of Apuleius' 'Golden Ass' cover the entire spectrum from a religious autobiography to an incongruous collection of titillating stories. The goal of this book is to explain the extraordinary polyphony of Apuleius' novel as a product of the 2nd century CE context, in which elite culture (philosophy and sophistic oratory) and popular entertainment not only share the same venues and appeal to the same audiences but also engage in active exchange of subject matter and histrionic techniques. The book argues that Apuleius' narrative represents a mosaic of discourses each of which possesses a respectable pedigree in the world of Greco-Roman 'paideia'. It further traces the ensuing ambiguity to the Second Sophistic rhetoric and concludes that the particular thrill of reading the novel consists in the ironic frustration of any attempt to discover a centripetal force in an irreducibly multi-polar text.
Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic - eros - and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted. For Plato, analysing our desires is a way of reflecting on the kind of people we will turn out to be and on our chances of leading a worthwhile and happy life. In its focus on the question why he considered desires to be amenable to this type of reflection, this book explores Plato's ethics of desire.
This Festschrift honours the Dutch Latinist Ben Hijmans. Besides his studies on Seneca philosophus and Ovid, Hijmans published numerous articles on Apuleius' works, both that author's philosophical and rhetorical oeuvre, and his novel, The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses. In 1973 he initiated the research project Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius, and until his retirement he was editor-in-chief of the series of commentaries issued from that research project. This collection of essays contains a number of important new and original articles on Apuleius' Metamorphoses (by Ken Dowden, Roger Beck, Ellen Finkelpearl, Maeve O'Brien), on the reception of the Latin novel (Harrison), and on Apuleius' rhetorical work (Vincent Hunink). The book presents original research on Ovid's Metamorphoses (Paula James) and its reception (Van der Paardt). Other contributions testify to the broader interests of Ben Hijmans and deal with general cultural aspects (Jan Pieter Guepin), art history (Henk van Os, Marietje d'Hane), or with the art of translating (John Gahan, Hero Hokwerda), with archaeology and iconography (Roman gems: Marianne Kleibrink; opus sectile panels at Kenchreai: Hector Williams). There is an impressive article on the religious and iconographic backgrounds of Horace's carmen saeculare (Steven Hijmans). Ben Hijmans' fascination with, and insight in mythical motifs is reflected not only in Paula James's and Van der Paardt's articles (on Pyramus and Thisbe and Actaeon respectively), but also in contributions by Rory Egan (Narcissus) and Danielle van Mal-Maeder (on Seneca's mythical tragedies and their transformation in Roman Declamation). John Wortley discusses developments in Boeotia in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Hugh Mason writes on the 'reality' of the apples in Sappho's poetry, and Fokke Akkerman discusses some treatises by Benedictus de Spinoza which illustrate his position on democracy.