Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full download Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature Sebastian Matzner file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature Sebastian Matzner file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature Sebastian Matzner file pdf all chapter on 2024
https://ebookmass.com/product/building-in-words-representations-
of-the-process-of-construction-in-latin-literature-bettina-reitz-
joosse/
https://ebookmass.com/product/modern-death-in-irish-and-latin-
american-literature-1st-ed-2020-edition-jacob-l-bender/
https://ebookmass.com/product/pestilence-and-the-body-politic-in-
latin-literature-hunter-h-gardner/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-emergence-of-neuroscience-and-
the-german-novel-poetics-of-the-brain-palgrave-studies-in-
literature-science-and-medicine-1st-ed-2021-edition-sonja-boos/
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature Roy
Gibson
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-cambridge-critical-guide-to-
latin-literature-roy-gibson/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-oxford-latin-syntax-volume-ii-
the-complex-sentence-and-discourse-harm-pinkster/
https://ebookmass.com/product/ambient-literature-towards-a-new-
poetics-of-situated-writing-and-reading-practices-1st-ed-edition-
tom-abba/
https://ebookmass.com/product/homer-and-the-poetics-of-hades-
first-edition-gazis/
https://ebookmass.com/product/ambient-literature-towards-a-new-
poetics-of-situated-writing-and-reading-practices-tom-abba/
Title Pages
Title Pages
Sebastian Matzner, Stephen Harrison
Page 1 of 2
Title Pages
Impression: 1
ISBN 978–0–19–881406–1
Page 2 of 2
Frontispiece
(p.ii) Frontispiece
Sebastian Matzner, Stephen Harrison
Page 1 of 2
Frontispiece
Page 2 of 2
Acknowledgements
(p.v) Acknowledgements
Sebastian Matzner, Stephen Harrison
This volume would not have been possible without the enthusiasm, expertise,
and responsiveness of its contributors: from the moment they accepted the
invitation to the eponymous conference, held under the auspices of the Centre
for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
on 4 and 5 September 2014, each one of them engaged spiritedly, generously,
and rigorously with the project as a whole. The fact that this volume is very
much the book-shaped version of a conversation—which began with pre-
circulated papers and incisive responses, continued with rich conference
discussions and further reflective dialogue between contributors and editors,
and now finds its final form in the pages that follow—is above all a testament to
the contributors’ commitment, patience, and good humour. They have made this
volume what it is.
The original conference itself was fortunate enough to receive support from
many different sources. Our gratitude goes to the John Fell Fund, the Craven
Fund, and the Classical Association for their generous financial help as well as
to the staff of Corpus Christi College for their wonderful hospitality. As the
Complex Inferiorities project and this resulting volume are one of the fruits of a
Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship awarded to Sebastian Matzner and held at
the Faculty of Classics in conjunction with the P. S. Allen Research Fellowship at
Corpus Christi College, special thanks are due to both the Trust and the Fellows
of Corpus.
We would also like to thank Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton, and the
superb team at Oxford University Press for their professionalism in all matters,
great and small, and, last but not least, the two anonymous readers for the
Page 1 of 2
Acknowledgements
Press, whose voices run ever so obliquely through this volume but did much to
improve the final product.
Sebastian Matzner
Stephen Harrison
Page 2 of 2
Note on Abbreviations
Greek and Latin authors and works are abbreviated following the practice of the
Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon and the Oxford Latin Dictionary,
respectively, and journals according to that of L’Année Philologique. (p.x)
Page 1 of 1
List of Contributors
Shadi Bartsch
is Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at
the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the literature and
philosophy of the Neronian period, especially the authors Lucan,
Seneca, and Persius. Her interpretations often draw from cultural
history, and she is particularly interested in the meeting-point of
poetic and philosophical genres. Her most recent books include
Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural (Chicago, 2015)
and The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero (ed. with K.
Freudenburg and C. Littlewood, Cambridge, 2017).
William Fitzgerald
is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at King’s College
London. His main research interests centre on Latin poetry, but he
has also worked on Latin prose (Pliny the Younger and Apuleius) as
well as topics in comparative literature and classical reception.
Among his monographs are Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and
the Drama of Position (Berkeley, 1995); Slavery and the Roman
Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 2000); and Martial: The
Epigrammatic World (Chicago, 2007). His latest book is Variety: The
Life of a Roman Concept (Chicago, 2016).
Tom Geue
is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St
Andrews where he will soon take up a lectureship in Latin. His
research investigates literature’s complex engagements with (and
disengagements from) the political, with a particular interest in the
conditions of writing under the Roman Principate and the contested
ground of the ‘self’ as a site for such literary-political
Page 1 of 4
List of Contributors
Page 2 of 4
List of Contributors
Page 3 of 4
List of Contributors
Vassiliki Panoussi
is Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary.
Her research focuses on Roman literature of the late Republic, the
age of Augustus, and the early Empire as informed through the study
of intertextuality, cultural anthropology, and (p.xiv) sexuality and
gender. She has published articles on Catullus, Cicero, Vergil, Seneca,
Lucan, and Statius and is the author of the monograph Greek Tragedy
in Vergil’s Aeneid: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext (Cambridge, 2009).
She has recently completed a second book, entitled Brides, Mourners,
Bacchae: Women’s Rituals in Roman Literature, and is the co-editor
of a forthcoming volume, Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome:
Representations and Reactions.
Amy Richlin
is Distinguished Professor of Classics at UCLA. Her scholarship
centres on outgroups and muted groups in ancient Rome—women,
slaves, sexual minorities, indigenous peoples in the provinces—and
confronts the problems inherent in writing the lives of people who left
few records for themselves. She has published widely on issues
related to gender in Rome from the Republic to late antiquity and is
the author of Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman
Women (Ann Arbor, 2014). Her most recent book, Slave Theater in the
Roman Republic (Cambridge, 2017), considers the rise of the palliata
in the context of war and slavery in the 200s BCE.
Victoria Rimell
is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Warwick. Her
research spans many different authors and genres and engages
critically with major themes in Roman literature and culture with a
view to promoting dialogue between classical philology and modern
philosophical and political thought. Her main focus is Latin literature
from the first century BCE to the second century CE, and she has
published books on Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (Cambridge,
2002); Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination
(Cambridge, 2006); Martial’s Rome: Empire and the Ideology of
Epigram (Cambridge, 2008); and, most recently, The Closure of Space
in Roman Poetics: Empire’s Inward Turn (Cambridge, 2015). In her
next project, she aims to reassess Senecan philosophical texts in the
light of recent work in the emerging field of vulnerability studies.
Page 4 of 4
Introduction
Introduction
Latin Literature’s Complex Inferiorities
Sebastian Matzner
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198814061.003.0001
Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and
the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority
on the university campus, they don’t need the word ‘subaltern’…They
should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They’re within
the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being
Page 1 of 11
Introduction
allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not
call themselves subaltern.
Politics and rhetorics that centre on the marginalized status of social groups—
framed in terms of minority, inferiority, or subalternity, and vigorously contested,
asserted, alleged, (re-)claimed, or rejected—constitute a significant feature of
twenty-first-century current affairs, both at domestic and international level. The
undoubted need to redress social injustices through critical debate and political
action notwithstanding, the apparent efficacy of mobilizing a weaker voice to
create and pursue possibilities for change seems to appeal not only in the
context of such struggles, but also in circumstances where the political stakes
are (relatively) less high, or even of a different kind altogether. Whatever one
makes of Spivak’s injunction against ‘illegitimate’ claims to the status of
subalternity, her vehement reaction draws attention to an important and
widespread strategy which has (p.2) to date received little sustained
discussion: the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who, in fact,
hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position.
Latin literature offers ideal conditions for the study of this phenomenon,
precisely because it is so overwhelmingly dominated by voices associated with
and representative of elite speech and imperial hegemony. As Clarke succinctly
notes,
[t]he problem with textual analysis, as all scholars are quick to admit, is
that elite men or men working for the elites wrote all the texts. In these
texts we fail to hear the voices of the other 98% of Roman society: non-elite
men (including the freeborn poor, slaves, former slaves, and foreigners)
and women of all classes (with the possible exception of Sulpicia, who—
even so—sounds like an elite man when she writes poetry).1
Except, we do hear their voices—just not, in most cases, coming from them.
Instead, a broad range of phenomena immediately springs to mind where writers
of (relatively) elite status adopt a markedly disempowered voice: topoi such as
recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in superior genres as appropriate
to the writer’s high social standing) and rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia
(artfully and strategically adopting a persona with a view to garnering favour,
even when this means temporarily forfeiting one’s higher status and discursive
privileges); whole works, such as Ovid’s Heroides with its long-silenced female
heroines; entire genres, such as satire with its irreverent take on the great and
the good, generically framed as articulated ‘from below’; and even large-scale
cultural self-positionings, such as expressions of Roman cultural inferiority vis-à-
vis classical Greece or the tensions that arise between meek and humble (yet
Page 2 of 11
Introduction
The present collection of essays began its life at the international conference
Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature, held
under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford (4–5 September 2014). The event brought
together scholars with expertise in different aspects of Latin literature to
discuss, compare, and assess the phenomenon of the deliberate assumption of a
markedly inferior voice in a broad range of texts and from a wide variety of
angles. Pre-circulated papers, briefly introduced by the speakers, commented on
by respondents, and extensively discussed at the event fostered dialogue and
engagement across the individual contributions and a high degree of mutual
responsiveness. As the contributors to the volume represent a wide range of
research specialisms in Latin studies, covering a number of different authors,
genres, periods, and working with different theoretical frameworks, the
individual chapters speak to specific debates in a range of specialist sub-fields of
Latin literary studies—including author criticism (notably Horace, Ovid, Martial,
Tacitus, Juvenal), genre criticism (epigram, elegy, comedy, satire), and cultural
criticism (subaltern studies, feminist criticism, sexuality studies, post-colonial
criticism, and critical race studies). At the same time, the book as a whole takes
forward in a focused and coherent way the study of a specific, widespread, yet
still largely under-studied phenomenon that will be known and of interest to
anyone working on Latin literature, especially those interested in its cultural
politics, discursive dynamics, and socially competitive poetics.
Page 3 of 11
Introduction
Page 4 of 11
Introduction
discussion with contemporary critical concerns and political issues. Many of the
contributors set out to achieve this by explicitly or implicitly connecting the
issues at stake here, in the particular context of Latin studies, with broader
concerns, intellectual developments, and conceptual frameworks of modern
critical theory that variously underwrite individual chapters and inform the
cognitive interest of the volume as a whole: from (p.6) Derridean notions of
deconstruction as a strategy to re-write centres from the margin, Rancière’s
reflections on intellectual emancipation and the power-laden discursive
differentiation between voices and noises, Bhabha’s assessment of the
structurally embedded power differential in colonial mimicry, to the debate,
opened by Spivak, on whether or not the subaltern can speak, and Bourdieu’s
analyses of the interconnected circulations and linguistic realizations of social,
cultural, and academic capital as crucial facilitators for structures and
performances of superiority and inferiority.6
The discussions both at the conference and during the preparation stage of this
volume not only emphasized the significance of the topic, its relative neglect by
scholars, and its relevance for debates within Classics, in neighbouring
disciplines in the humanities, and in contemporary critical discourse at large;
they also cast into relief the importance and necessity of taking a multi-
perspectival approach, drawing together instances of this phenomenon in
different conformations and contexts in order to carve out structurally
comparable dynamics, recurring rhetorical manoeuvres, and modes and
techniques of authorial self-fashioning that collectively constitute the
multifaceted poetics of the weaker voice. It soon become clear that this
approach is indispensable for adequately capturing the important role of
intersectionality, which emerged as crucial not only in analysing the dynamics of
concrete oppression, but also in studying what happens in these playful and/or
strategic manipulations of discursive hierarchies: the mutually modifying and
interlinking (rather than merely cumulative) impact of always being implicated
in several socio-cultural hierarchies at once, as described by intersectionality
theory, proved highly pertinent to the poetics of the weaker voice examined
here, since the deliberate assumption of weakness or inferiority, more often than
not, ties in with complex lateral effects that trigger re-positionings in other
hierarchically organized fields and spheres. These complexities and dimensions
get lost when instances of the phenomenon of an assumed weaker voice are
discussed, as is typically the case, in the context of studies tightly focused on
individual authors, genres, or groups relegated to inferiority (slaves, women,
barbarians, the plebs, same-sex lovers, etc.). It is precisely in order to promote
greater communication within and across Latin literary studies as well as to take
forward the (p.7) interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon by fostering
greater dialogue between Latin literary studies and other humanities disciplines
engaged with these issues that the format of an edited collection has been
chosen to disseminate the results of our collaborative research on this project.
Page 5 of 11
Introduction
With the broader intellectual and critical context of the volume thus mapped out,
the first chapter accomplishes the remaining introductory tasks of summarizing
the scholarly debate to date and raising the central conceptual issues: in
‘Claiming Inferiority: Weakness into Strength’, William Fitzgerald’s survey of
recent scholarship pinpoints engagements with this principle as a central pre-
occupation of Latin studies over the last thirty years and ponders the limitations
of its conventional treatment and understanding by way of discussing a series of
examples from Latin literature against the wider context of modern thought.
Addressing central dimensions of the poetics of the weaker voice, which are
studied in detail in other contributions to this volume (as indicated through
cross-references in the footnotes)—notably: authorial self-fashioning, hierarchies
of genres, and value judgements tied to positions within literary traditions—
Fitzgerald proposes that, while there are many ways to stage a complex of
inferiorities in any text, the central strategy most, if not all, of them rely upon is
an upheaval of expectations. Formulating a theoretical position that informs and
recurs in many of the subsequent chapters, Fitzgerald demonstrates how literary
inferiority often almost paradoxically leads to an authorial voice of superiority as
the ‘discourse of the low’ turns the tables on the ‘high’ and these texts marshal
their own inferiority against the reader/audience, urging them to reconsider
their judgement of superiority and inferiority.
Page 6 of 11
Introduction
Concerted efforts in almost the opposite direction are the topic of Tom Geue’s
chapter ‘Drawing Blanks: The Pale Shades of “Phaedrus” and “Juvenal”’.
Discussing in turn two exponents of satiric literature writing under the
politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, he elaborates their shared
yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure. As his reflections show, these
not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity—name, body, and
autobiography—ineffective; in doing so, they also foreground and relish the
particular potential of literature as the written word precisely in its supposed
inferiority to author-bound speech. A strikingly complex and dynamic middle
way that combines elements of self-effacement, as discussed by Geue, and
elements of shoring up one’s status against an unfavourable position in various
hierarchies, as discussed by Julhe, emerges from Victoria Rimell’s chapter on
‘The Creative Superiority of Self-Reproach: Horace’s Ars Poetica’. Her close
reading teases out how this text negotiates a delicate tension and balance
between Horace’s own inferior social status and superior status as older expert
on the one hand, and the superior social status and inferior age/expertise of the
young Pisones for whom he writes on the other. Her analysis makes visible how
the text renders productive the challenges that result from these asymmetries by
modelling and performing a mode of critical thinking centred on self-critique and
self-reflection. Taking into account the dimension of class difference allows
Rimell to offer a new understanding of both the Ars Poetica’s emphasis on
coherence and consistence and its obsession with tragedy, by pointing to the (p.
9) challenges contained and represented in the political microcosm of the
theatre where—just as in Horace’s pedagogical encounter with the Pisones—
shifting power relations among an unwieldy mix of members from different
classes, all jointly engaged in the performance of art and art criticism, need to
be carefully negotiated.
The potentially devastating effects of the clamor of the plebs in the theatre
crowd, which loom large in the background of the Ars Poetica as a force to be
reckoned with by the young aristocrats, receive further discussion and analysis
in Ellen O’Gorman’s essay ‘“The Noise, and the People”: Popular clamor and
Political Discourse in Latin Historiography’. Drawing on the work of Rancière
and Kristeva, O’Gorman offers a reappraisal of how clamor signifies, both in
terms of the modalities of its political presence and efficacy and in terms of its
mimetic irruption within historiographic writing: popular clamor emerges as
bodily sound rather than rational speech, as a distinctive political counter-
rhythm to the controlled, referential discourse of forensic oratory. Dunstan
Lowe’s chapter, ‘Loud and Proud: The Voice of the praeco in Roman Love Elegy’,
brings into view another non-elite voice that lingers in a different genre of Latin
literature and is likewise typically overshadowed by elite oratory, that of the
praeco (‘announcer’). Lowe’s discussion shows how, in keeping with love elegy’s
favouring of counter-cultural idioms that subvert the social ideals and
expectations of freeborn elite Roman males, the praeco as a low-status, informal
Page 7 of 11
Introduction
public speaker (details of whose speeches are lost to us) can be reconstructed as
an important part of the playfully inferior self-stylization of the love elegists’
poetic persona.
A further often-muted voice, this time in the terrain of sexual attraction, is the
topic of Stephen Harrison’s chapter on ‘Hidden Voices: Homoerotic Colour in
Horace’s Odes’. Taking his cue from re-assessments of homoerotic material in
Latin literature in more recent scholarship, Harrison zooms in on a range of
passages in the Odes where the poet-narrator implicitly or explicitly alludes to
homoerotic desires, arguing that closer attention to focalization and perspective
show that they convey conformations of desire far less unambiguously
‘heterosexual’ than is often assumed. The various dynamics, logics, and rhetorics
of desire in the light of inferiority and superiority are subjected to closer
scrutiny in Gregory Hutchinson’s essay ‘On Not Being Beautiful’. Drawing on
symbolic logic, Hutchinson examines the relationship between assessing
superiority or inferiority in beauty and choices in love in both Greek and Latin
literature. His (p.10) discussion addresses the complex scenarios that unfold
here (paying special attention to the various ways in which the hierarchies of
love are set in relation to other hierarchies) as well as to the intriguing fact that
such questions of relative inferiority and superiority in erotic matters seem to
pervade Greek literature more extensively and differently than Latin.
Page 8 of 11
Introduction
The volume’s final chapter also addresses the challenge of reconciling the
grandeur of classical yet pagan writings, notably Vergil’s canonical epic, with
the Christian commitment to the truth of the gospel and its values of simplicity
and humility, but takes it up from the perspective of literary production rather
than literary interpretation. Philip Hardie’s essay on ‘Cowherds and Saints:
Paulinus of Nola Carmen 18’ draws on Auerbach’s arguments in his classic
Mimesis (p.11) to analyse the roles of realism and laughter in this poem and to
illuminate the dynamics between the multiple hierarchies of social, educational,
and spiritual status that are negotiated by this text, encompassing the variously
intersecting relationships between writer and readers, rustic protagonist and
saintly patronus, Christian writing and Vergilian epic.
The linear arrangement of the chapters in this order, which groups the
contributions into overlapping segments whose respective emphasis of critical
interest gradually shifts from one set to the next, showcases only one thread of
connections that ties the contributions together. Given, however, the particular
relevance of intersectionality in studying the strategic assumption and
manipulation of the weaker voice, this volume resembles not so much a
telescope that offers a chronological retrospective into the past, as a
kaleidoscope that requires an active user, ready to move around the individual
chapters and to read them in new juxtapositions in order to unfold the many
further interconnections created through recurring themes, salient complexes,
and emerging junctures that affect multiple spheres and hierarchies. To do so
means to activate further clusters of closely related chapters which cut across
their present linear arrangement, for instance: different modes of authorial self-
fashioning through strategic self-debasement, self-effacement, or erasure in the
contributions by Geue, Fitzgerald, Julhe, Lowe, Matzner, and Rimell; fresh
efforts to trace presences—both verbal and non-verbal—of the marginalized and
the subaltern in the chapters by Harrison, Lowe, O’Gorman, and Richlin; the
power asymmetries at play in ancient critical practice and aesthetic judgement
as discussed by Bartsch, Hutchinson, Matzner, and Rimell; explorations of the
role of gender and sexuality in presentations of abject, mute(d), modulated, and
ventriloquized voices in Fitzgerald, Harrison, Panoussi, and Richlin; questions of
intercultural inferiority—as inflected by ethnicity (Julhe, Richlin), imperialist
centre-periphery dynamics (Julhe, Matzner), or competing literary traditions
(Bartsch, Hardie, Matzner)—and of socio-economic inferiority (Geue, Hardie,
Julhe, Lowe, O’Gorman, Richlin, Rimell). In addition to these major clusters of
themes treated in this volume’s essays, there are many more and often
overlapping dimensions that variously bind together individual chapters which
the cross-references between the chapters invite the reader to explore.
Page 9 of 11
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
– Menjünk el mindjárt – szólt a zsidó az ajtó felé haladva, – ha a
hadnagyok felébrednek, téged nem eresztenek el.
– Igazság – szólt Czifra, a palaczkban megmaradt pálinkát
felhajtva – mint a marhát a vásárra, úgy viszik az embert
restellatióra.
A két alak eltünt s csendes lőn a szobában, hol a mécs
erősebben lobogva végéhez közelge. Miután a távozók léptei
elhangzottak, a bundák s szűrők halmaza alól, mely a csapszék
egyik szegletében feküdt, egyszerre Peti czigány fekete arcza merült
fel. Kifáradva a végtelen muzsikálástól, melylyel a kortesek hosszú
lakomáját füszerezé, a barna hegedüs pár órával előbb az egyik pad
alá vonult, s itt eltakarva a padra vetett szűrök által, boldog álomba
szenderült, melyből csak Czifra s a zsidó beszélgetése által
ébresztetett fel. – A czigány véletlen rejtekében végig hallá
beszélgetésöket s most midőn távozásokról biztos vala, kimászva
padja alól, nyakába akasztá bundáját s a mécset eloltva kilopódzott
a szobából. Kevés perczczel később künn a mezőn találjuk őt, hol
szokása szerint fütyörészve nagy léptekkel siet Szt.-Vilmos felé.
XIV.