Lethaeus Amor: Love and Memory in Latin Elegy.

Latin poetry;Classical Studies;Humanities;Classical Studies

Lee, Ellen M.Caston, Ruth Rothaus ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Latin poetry;    Classical Studies;    Humanities;    Classical Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/120681/coleem_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation considers the connection between love and memory (or, as often, forgetting) in Roman elegiac poetry, through the lens of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love). I argue that, by writing Remedia, the last poem in the corpus of Latin love elegy, as an ;;art of forgetting’ which purports to aid the unlucky lover by teaching him to forget love, Ovid underscores the significance of memory in the elegiac genre. By telling readers how to forget, Ovid reveals how previous poets, including himself, taught readers how to remember. I investigate the connection between love and memory in elegy by pinpointing elegiac modes of amorous memory production. My method of analysis extracts certain pieces of advice (praecepta) given by the didactic narrator of Remedia, who guides the reader to rid himself of love. Even as his purportedly curative precepts inevitably fail, they point to elegiac strategies for memory production. My chapters treat these methods of creating memory thematically, each outlining a different piece of advice for forgetting, paired with a corresponding strategy for memory production in the elegiac genre: strategies for memorialization after death (Chapter 1); strategies for rescripting the localized memory of love (Chapter 2); strategies for creating false memories of the beloved (Chapter 3); women’s strategies for epistolary memory production (Chapter 4); and strategies for scripting poetic memory through allusion and tropes (Chapter 5). I propose that Remedia offers a guide for the reader of elegy, underscoring the importance of these strategies of memory production for the program of the elegiac genre.In addition to considering how the advice Ovid gives recalls his own previous works (the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Heroides), I explore how Ovid’s Remedia receives the works of his poetic predecessors, including Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and even Homer. To investigate the broader cultural milieu of Roman memorialization and mnemotechnics, I utilize frameworks from social, poetic, and cognitive memory studies.