Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Problem of Ecopoetics

奥维德的变形记和生态诗学问题

• 批准号: 2594552
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2594552
• 关键词: Ovid; Metamorphoses; Problem; Ecopoetics

In the context of a broad 'posthuman' movement in the Classics, scholars are starting to ask what ancient poets have to say about the non-human environment (Schliephake 2017; Armstrong 2019; The Postclassicisms Collective 2019; Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes 2019; Porter 2019). A conference on 'Metamorphosis and the Environmental Imagination' (UCLA 2019), to become a volume in Bloomsbury's Ancient Environment series, showcases a variety of ecocritical approaches to Metamorphoses, from a reimagining of Phaethon in light of the climate crisis to a consideration of affinities between people and trees (see also Gowers 2005). Francesca Martelli (2020), too, anticipates that a range of ecological thought will provide an important new direction for criticism on Metamorphoses. Martindale (1997, 109-10), however, has suggested that the character of environmental activism is at odds with the self-reflexiveness and playful irony of literature in the Hellenistic tradition. Moreover, despite blurring boundaries between 'Man and Nature', the world-view of Metamorphoses has been characterised as fundamentally anthropocentric (Gildenhard and Zissos 2013, 68-72; Sissa 2019), whereas ecological thought tries to level human with non-human. I aim to provide a way forward by viewing Metamorphoses less as an exposition of an ecological philosophy and more as a confrontation of the problem of talking about the nonhuman through poetry. Ovid makes the important choice of having characters lose the power of speech along with human form, raising the possibility that their new experience of reality is inaccessible to the poet's verbal art. When Daphne becomes the laurel, for example, she seems to give mute assent to Apollo's prophecies by shaking her boughs. Callimachus in Iamb. 4, however, had presented a laurel shaking its boughs in indignation during a fully articulateargument with an olive tree (Kerkhecker 1999, 86-87), suggesting that quite a different emotion might lie behind the laurel's gesture in Metamorphoses. In Ovid's version, Daphne has crossed over into tree world: her intentions are unknowable and anthropomorphic Apollo, god and paradigm of poets, distorts her inscrutable communication (if it can be called that) for his own ends.Current ecological writers also face the problem of moving beyond the human perspective using human modes of expression. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2013; 2015), Donna Haraway (2016), and Timothy Morton (2016; 2018) respond to this difficulty by producing work characterised by a penchant for heterogeneity; an inscrutable, semi-flippant attitude; an attraction to paradox; and the avoidance of satisfying conclusions. These are well-established features of the authorial voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses but their relevance to ecocriticism has gone unappreciated, given that previous critics have focused on what the poet says about the environment rather than how he goes about saying it. My research will account for why Ovid's subversive poetics seem to place him at the cutting edge of ecological thought, and explore how the work might have conjured thoughts that we would call 'ecological' in its contemporary Roman readership.Beyond Metamorphoses, this project suggests future avenues of investigation into the agency of objects and the poems about them in Latin poetry.

在古典文学中广泛的“后人类”运动的背景下，学者们开始询问古代诗人对非人类环境有何看法（Schliephake 2017; Armstrong 2019;后古典主义集体2019;比安奇、布里尔和霍姆斯2019;波特2019）。一个关于“变形和环境想象力”的会议（加州大学洛杉矶分校2019年），成为布卢姆斯伯里的古代环境系列的一卷，展示了各种生态批评的方法来变形，从根据气候危机重新想象法厄同到考虑人与树木之间的亲和力（另见高尔斯2005）。Francesca Martelli（2020）也预计，一系列生态思想将为《变形记》的批评提供一个重要的新方向。然而，马丁代尔（Martindale，1997，第109- 1010页）认为，环境行动主义的特征与希腊化传统文学的自我反思和戏谑讽刺是不一致的。此外，尽管“人与自然”之间的界限模糊，但《变形记》的世界观从根本上被描述为以人类为中心（Gildenhard and Zissos 2013，68-72;西萨2019），而生态思想则试图将人类与非人类相提并论。我的目的是提供一种前进的方式，把《变形记》看作是一种生态哲学的阐述，而更多的是一种通过诗歌谈论非人类问题的对抗。奥维德做出了一个重要的选择，让人物沿着失去了说话的能力，这增加了诗人的语言艺术无法接触到他们对现实的新体验的可能性。例如，当达芙妮成为月桂树时，她似乎通过摇动树枝来无声地同意阿波罗的预言。卡利马科斯在Iamb。然而，在与一棵橄榄树的一次充分清晰的争论中，4展示了一棵月桂树愤怒地摇动着树枝（Kerkhecker 1999，86-87），这表明在《变形记》中月桂树的姿态背后可能隐藏着一种完全不同的情感。在奥维德的文本中，达芙妮穿越到了树的世界：她的意图是不可知的，拟人化的，阿波罗，上帝和诗人的典范，为了自己的目的而扭曲了她神秘莫测的交流（如果可以这么说的话）。杰弗里·杰罗姆·科恩（2013; 2015）、唐娜·哈拉维（2016; 2018）和蒂莫西·莫顿（2016; 2018）通过创作具有异质性倾向的作品来应对这一困难;一种不可思议的、半轻率的态度;对悖论的吸引力;以及避免令人满意的结论。这些都是奥维德的《变形记》中作者声音的既定特征，但它们与生态批评的相关性却没有得到重视，因为以前的批评家们关注的是诗人对环境说了什么，而不是他如何去说。我的研究将解释为什么奥维德的颠覆性诗学似乎将他置于生态思想的前沿，并探索这部作品如何在当代罗马读者中唤起我们称之为“生态”的思想。除了《变形记》，这个项目还提出了未来研究对象的机构和拉丁诗歌中关于它们的诗歌的途径。