Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Desiring Rome: Male Subjectivity and Reading Ovid's Fasti

Desiring Rome: Male Subjectivity and Reading Ovid's Fasti

King, Richard

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0814256562
ISBN13: 9780814256565
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Oct 9 2020
Pages: 342
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.76 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
During his last two decades (ca. 2 BCE-17 CE), Ovid composed, but never completed, his Fasti, an elegiac representation of Rome's rites and festivals: only six of twelve month-books remain. Earlier scholars have claimed that this is due either to Ovid's exile from Rome (which put him out of touch with the Roman literary world) or else his frustration over the Roman calendar's discontinuity. Drawing upon recent scholarship in gender studies and Lacanian film theory, Richard J. King analyzes this exilic incompletion as inviting the citizen male reader into what he calls an angular or skewed viewpoint, which interrogates the Roman hierarchical and male-dominated social order, insofar as it is mirrored in the Roman calendar of rites and festivals. Ovid (already well known and even infamous as the composer of erotic poems and the Metamorphoses) does this by emulating the civic gesture of calendar presentation, whereby upwardly mobile adult male citizens caused calendars to be carved in stone and set up in conspicuous public places to reflect the city's pride and to build their own prestige as public figures. In this innovative study, King discusses the Fasti as Ovid's socially strategic use of this gesture. Interrupted by exile and filled with varying explanations of Roman festivals, Ovid's poetic version manifests a form whose brokenness comments on the fractured identity of the exiled poet and citizen subjects generally in an imperial order ambivalent toward its greatest poet.

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