Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Problem of Ecopoetics

在古典文学中一场广泛的“死后”运动的背景下，学者们开始询问古代诗人对非人类环境有什么看法(Schliephake 2017；Armstrong 2019；后古典主义集合体2019；Bianci，Brill和Holmes 2019；Porter 2019)。关于“变形与环境想象”的会议(UCLA 2019)，将成为布鲁姆斯伯里的古代环境系列的一卷，展示了各种生态关键的变形方法，从根据气候危机重新想象非依顿到考虑人与树之间的亲和力(另见Gowers 2005)。弗朗西丝卡·马尔泰利(2020)也预计，一系列的生态思想将为《变形记》的批评提供一个重要的新方向。然而，Martindale(1997,109-10)提出，环境激进主义的特征与希腊化传统中文学的自我反省和顽皮的讽刺是不一致的。此外，尽管“人与自然”之间的界限变得模糊，但“变形记”的世界观从根本上被描述为以人类为中心(Gildenard and Zissos 2013，68-72；Sissa 2019)，而生态思想试图将人类与非人类等同起来。我的目标是提供一条前进的道路，将《变形记》与其说是一种生态哲学的阐述，不如说是一种对抗通过诗歌谈论非人类的问题。奥维德做出了一个重要的选择，让人物随着人类的形式而失去了说话的能力，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，当达芙妮成为桂冠时，她似乎通过摇动树枝来默许阿波罗的预言。阿兰布的卡利马库斯。然而，在与橄榄树的一次完全清晰的演讲中，4在愤怒中展示了一棵桂树摇动着树枝(Kerkherker 1999，86-87)，这表明在《变形记》中桂树的手势背后可能隐藏着完全不同的情感。在奥维德的译本中，达芙妮已经进入了树的世界：她的意图是不可知的，拟人化的阿波罗，诗人的神和典范，扭曲了她为了自己的目的而进行的神秘的交流(如果可以这样说的话)。当前的生态作家也面临着用人类的表达方式超越人类视角的问题。杰弗里·杰罗姆·科恩(2013；2015)、唐娜·哈拉韦(Donna Haraway)(2016)和蒂莫西·莫顿(Timothy Morton，2016；2018)对这一困难做出了回应，他们的作品特点是对异质性的偏好；神秘、半浮躁的态度；对悖论的吸引；以及避免令人满意的结论。这些都是奥维德《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赏识，因为之前的批评家们把重点放在了诗人对环境的看法上，而不是他如何表达环境。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唤起我们在其当代罗马读者中被称为“生态”的思想。这个项目提出了未来研究对象的中介和拉丁诗歌中关于它们的诗歌的途径。

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.