Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Allusion and intertext: Dynamics of appropriation in Roman poetry - Stephen Hinds

I seem to be doing nothing but read the Roman Literature and its contexts books at the moment, for lo, this is another one. And I have to say that I honestly think most of this just went by me at high speed because my brain isn't in poetry mode at the moment. Hinds' main theme is how the reception of texts is always changed by both the moment of reception and the culture of the receiver, so no reception is ever the same. He does some very nice stuff about how to take intertextual references further than just 'oh, look, this passage looks a bit like that other passage, that's interesting' - for instance, he points out that Ennius wasn't always an archaic poet. Other poets had to create his archaic status. He also gives some good consideration to the question of deliberate degradation created by the so-called Silver Age poets, who are always talking about how degenerate their own work is - and have been rather unquestioningly believed, which is a bit of a pain and deserves further examination. (Although just because someone says he's a crap poet doesn't mean he isn't, of course.)

There's also a really brilliant bit about Hector and Andromache as sex symbols in the interplay between Ovid and Martial, and I swear, I was sitting there going 'hang on a mo, this is just like my Priapea paper except... hang on, since when did Homer become this sexy?' So that's another research project for another day.

But anyway. This book gives some very clever, very clearly written ways of thinking about allusion and intertexuality that get beyond dry analysis of 'passage X is modelled on passage Y', and thank goodness for that. I have to say that I am wondering now about genre, as Hinds deliberately only looks at poetry and not particularly at prose, and I think a lot of the points went by me as I am elbow-deep in Latin prose at the moment. It's definitely one to come back to, and one that is worth picking up - and, I'm going to put my neck out, a lot of the content is rather applicable to the reception theory question, and I am wondering whether I might at some stage try and do something with that. But again, another project for another day.

Comments

[angelislington.livejournal.com]

I think I will add this one to the (considerably growing ;-) To Read pile :)

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

I am intrigued by this dynamic between prose and verse you set up. Allusion or intertextuality is certainly a feature of prose, is it not?

I do think Hinds book is fundamental, although I am (predictably) not to pleased how he devalues parody. Lowell Edmunds' intertexuality book is better on that score - he devotes four whole pages to parody. Still, Edmunds' book is well worth looking at if you haven't already read it, when you come back to the question.

[iris4700.livejournal.com]

I actually like the blend of Hinds, Edmunds and then Pucci's rather different book for various takes on intertextuality. I like the hinds, but even more so than many of the other books in the series it reads as "meditations on intertextuality" rather than something larger.

As for intertextuality as a feature of prose - just look at Tacitus :-) I.e. I agree with you.

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

The full-knowing reader. I didn't know anyone still read his book.

You are right about Hinds's exploratory and accessible approach.

[iris4700.livejournal.com]

probably few do, but I'm one of them. I found it helpful.

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

I should read it, I guess.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, it is a feature of prose, but I am not quite sure how take Hinds' discussion of intertextuality and apply it to prose. This may just be because at the moment my head is in a completely different kind of space (how reusing exempla works as a moral model, which is a different kind of allusion that doesn't necessarily work very well within Hinds' parameters). But it is something I should come back to, and I do think I'd get a better handle on Hinds' ideas (which are expressed through the medium of poetry, after all) if I were elbow-deep in some good old-fashioned Senecan drama.

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think that exemplarity can function in a similar way, especially if it is allusive rather than ad hoc. Admittedly, it has been 4 or 5 years since I read that book, so I may be attributing to H. ideas of intertextuality that are not his.

Is the Hostius Quadra exemplum (Nat. Quaest. 1.16) ad hoc? I don't think I've seen it elsewhere, though the vita of Horace has a similar story.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

It's not something that the writers on exemplarity are big on - or, rather, when they are, they talk about it using slightly different terms, more about the particular 'message' that a writer is trying to send with a given exemplum instead of how making the emphasis of an exemplum X changes how we have read all previous occasions of that exemplum (for instance). It is an approach that might work quite well, but I have to say I would need to a) re-read Hinds and b) have a case study in front of me to play with. I do want to follow up the Homeric porn angle at some point, though.

I don't think Hostius Quadra turns up elsewhere; I've not spent a lot of time with him, or for that matter the Naturales Quaestiones, although he does make an obligatory appearance in a footnote to chapter 3, so my knowledge of him isn't encyclopedic.

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

Not something the writers on exemplarity are big on. True, and for that matter, Hinds' observation about the backward effect of allusion is not something poetry people are particularly big on. It is hard to know what to do with the observation, even if it is true; in addition, historicist principles require readers to 'bracket,' ut ita dicam, knowledge of later material.

It is undeniable, however, that a subsequent use can color anyone reading of the earlier material. Seneca's use of Maecenas, for example, would be hard to forget if we then had Maecenas's poetry to evaluate.

I would suggest, then, that the question of allusion so framed is not one of degree of metricality (verse is more regular than prose), but of what the interpreter wants to do with the work. After all, exemplarity is a feature of Latin poetry as well as prose.

I'm starting to ride my hobby-horse; apologies are called for. I feel that the study of Latin has suffers under too rigid and (in my view) misguided division between prose and verse.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I certainly agree with you that the prose/verse division is at best irksome and at worst deeply dangerous; trying to define myself as a Latin Literature person in general at this stage is actually more difficult than it looks when the thesis and article are both on prose works. (All the more reason to get the Priapea article into shape, but I digress.) But I think one of the problems with Hinds' book in that respect is that it does so much talk in terms of poetry that it makes it hard to work out what to do with his argument in terms of prose. My brain is currently rather sluggishly swimming around the shallows here; part of me thinks that, if I had the opportunity to do some practical application of this onto poetry, I'd work out where it needed to go in order to make sense of it in prose (and indeed across the border).

That part of me thinks many things, however, and not all of them are realistic.

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

trying to define myself as a Latin Literature person in general at this stage is actually more difficult than it looks when the thesis and article are both on prose works. Hi, you just described me.

I agree that Hinds selection of examples is hardly comprehensive; as far as I'm concerned, though, there is little difficulty in moving from poetry to prose in his, or Edmunds, terms. Certain types of prose works, like poetry, are more densely allusive, of course, and those are the types of prose works that happen to be the works I focus on.

Part of the disconnect between poetry and prose among modern Latinists may have something to do with the legacy of new criticism and its fascination with the poem as microcosm. It is much harder to read Latin prose works as a microcosm. Allusion and intertextuality, however, should help as it attacks the idea of poem as microcosm and brings it close to prose as a literary system.

Hopefully, in the next decade we Latin literature people can remake the map.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I have to admit that I haven't consciously come across the idea of poem as microcosm, partly because of spending most of my time playing in prose, partly because - well, that would have involved someone pointing out new criticism to me at some point before I started playing in prose. Can you just elaborate a wee bit for me? (Yes, I know I am assisting you in the hobby horse. Believe me, I wouldn't be if I wasn't finding it interesting.)

[poldyb.livejournal.com]

It is the legacy of new criticism (e.g. Cleanth Brooks, the well wrought urn. Most of our teachers - or teacher's teachers - grew up when this was the new fancy way of reading. You are unlikely to have found any of the new critical views clearly expressed since many of them had become accepted practice. Ideas like 'close reading' are a legacy.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Now, it's interesting you should say that about close reading, given that I've always seen close reading as a tool equally applicable to prose and poetry. I may have to get around to chasing this. At some point. Along with Everything Else In The World Ever.

[greenelephant.livejournal.com]

Not that anyone here needs more to read, but there is a recent (and quite good, I think) book on the intersection of intertextuality, prose and poetry in Pliny's letters by Rutgers alumna Ilaria Marchesi.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Now that is worth knowing about - thanks for pointing it out!

[entscheidung.livejournal.com]

Timothy O'Sullivan's "Death ante ora parentum in Virgil's AEneid" in the most recent TAPA is also worth reading for the notion of reception and placement of the poet's self within a fashioned context of other poets. It very much addresses "dynamics of appropriation," though in a much more Bloomian sense than Hinds seems to from your precis.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Thanks for pointing that out; I'll try and find my copy when I have a spare minute.

[landfill-sky.livejournal.com]

Hello, I have read your User Info (obv.) and so know you don't usually friend people you don't know, but I thought I'd chip up on the off chance.
We've got an awful lot of friends in common, and I know more than once you've posted comments on people's entries, and my responses have been *mirrors your feelings* So I thought it would be about time I got to know you myself. Obviously only if you were ok with mutual friending :)

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Hi there! I'm flattered by your interest, and glad that what I write sometimes hits things on the head for you.

That said - for a number of reasons, most of which are to do with living in a different continent to most of my friends-group, I tend only to add people I have met in RL these days. So please don't be offended if I don't friend back, but feel free to follow along with the public kit if it looks like it might interest you - there is a lot of Doctor Who in the mix at the moment...