Course module - The Poetry of Ovid
Code : CLAH31262 Credit rating: 20 Semester : 2
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Aims |
Objectives |
Assessment |
Information
|
Course Content |
Course Materials |
Tutors |
Timetable |
Teaching Methods |
Keywords
Aims
To engage in thorough and sophisticated reading of the mythological poems of Ovid (Heroides for non-linguists, Metamorphoses, and Fasti for all), leading to knowledge of and critical thought about the texts and analyses of them.
Objectives (Learning Outcomes)
Students who satisfactorily complete this course will be able to:
Knowledge and understanding
• demonstrate sound knowledge of these central texts of Ovidian poetry, and of their relations to other elements in the Graeco-Roman literary tradition, as well as the cultural politics of their reception in Augustan Rome
• offer informed and critically sophisticated close readings of Ovidian poems and passages, as well as to consider larger issues and make wide-ranging connections both within the Ovidian corpus and beyond it
Intellectual skills
• For linguists: the ability to translate, scan, and critically analyse the passages set from the poems, within the context of knowledge of the whole of the Metamorphoses and Fasti.
• For non-linguists: the ability to engage directly with the text of the poems Heroides, Metamorphoses and Fasti in translation.
Practical skills
• manage time and resources
Transferable skills and personal qualities
• to construct an argument in written and oral form
• pose questions about complex issues
• assimilate and summarise large quantities of evidence
• locate and retrieve relevant information from primary sources
• engage in critical discussion
Assessment
Exam (3 hours) 100%
Information
THIS COURSE IS AVAILABLE AS A FREE CHOICE
Pre-requisite units: for those reading the poems only in translation: none;
for those reading some parts of the poems in Latin: (at least) Advanced Latin 1 or equivalent (higher is fine); student must be at L3
Anti-requisite: this course cannot be combined with CLAH 21262 Ovid.
Co-requisite units: for those reading the poems only in translation: none;
for those reading some parts of the poems in Latin: (at least) Advanced Latin 2 or equivalent (higher is fine)
Those taking this course alongside Advanced Latin 2 or 3 are required to take it as linguists. Level 3 students taking Advanced Latin 1 alongside this course may either take the level 2 linguist version of the course (subject to the University restriction that not more than 20 credits may be taken at level 2) or the non-linguist level 3 version. If you are in any doubt about which level of the course is appropriate for you, please ask.
Student must be at Level 3.
Course Content
In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, an older monk responds to the question of his junior as to whether he has ever been in love by saying "many times -- Virgil, Ovid...". Many ages have been in love with Ovid, who is currently the darling of the post-modern critical world, as he was of the mediaeval troubadours and monastic scribes, while in between such giants of early modern English literature at Shakespeare would have subscribed to the view that "Ovid was master" (from Ovid's own Art of Love 2.744). This course will concentrate on the Ovidian poems whose subject matter is broadly mythological: his great, but incorrigibly playful, epic of the world of change, the Metamorphoses; and his elegiac poem on the Roman calendar, where myth explains religion, the Fasti.
The lectures will be broadly thematic, although concentrating at different times on different poems. Themes to be addressed include:
• Ovid’s place in the intertextual tradition, particularly with regard to Virgil and to Callimachus
• The Romanness of Greek mythology, and vice versa
• Genre
• Narratology
• Art and artistry
• Gender and transgression
• The place of violence in Roman myths and aesthetics
• Fantasy and realism
• Psychology and the uses of mythology
• Poetry and politics in the later Augustan period
Course Materials
Tutor(s)
Sharrock, Professor Alison
Timetable
Teaching Methods
2 lectures per week
1 seminar per week
Preliminary reading
Set texts:
Students are expected to acquire copies of the following, and to read them before the course begins.
1. Ovid ‘Metamorphoses’, translated by David Raeburn (introduction by Denis Feeney). Penguin books, 2004. ISNB: 9780140447897.
2. Ovid ‘Fasti’, translated and edited by Anthony Boyle and Roger Woodward. Penguin books, 2000. ISBN: 9780140446906.
3. For Level 3 non-linguists only: Ovid ‘Heroides’, translated and edited by Harold Isbell. Penguin books, 1990. ISBN: 9780140423556.
4. For linguists only: Anderson, W. S. (2000/1998/1997) Ovid Metamorphoses Books 1-5, University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK and London. ISBN: 9780806128948.
5. For Level 3 linguists only: Fantham, E. (1998) Ovid Fasti Book IV, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISNB: 9780521449960.
Other indicative reading:
Students are strongly advised to read some of the following before the course begins.
Boyd, B. W. (2002) Brill’s Companion to Ovid. Leiden.
Not online, but three copies on one night loan. Particularly recommended are Chapter 6 on Fasti , Chapter 7 on politics history and religion, Chapter 9 on narrative techniques, Chapter 10 on Roman history and Augustan politics in 11-15.
Hardie, P. R. (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge.
Available online. Particularly recommended are Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13.
Knox, P. E. (ed.) (2009) A Companion to Ovid. Oxford.
Available as e-book at: http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/AbstractView/S9781444310610.
See particularly Chapters 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 17, 25.
Other indicative reading includes:
Holzberg, N. (2002) Ovid: The Poet and his Work. Ithaca, NY.
Good general introduction.
Mack, S. (1988) Ovid. New Haven, CT.
An introductory book, now slightly dated but very worthwhile.
Barkan, L. (1986) The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven, CT and London.
Brown, S. (2005) Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis. London.
Daphne, Actaeon, Philomela, Arachne, Pygmalion. A good introduction.