Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception

Description

Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which functions as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of these texts. Reviewing and working with various influential approaches to textual absence, the contributors to Unspoken Rome treat these texts as silent types, listening out for what they do not say, and how they do not speak, whilst also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built. FM Contents Figures Unspoken Rome: Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction I. Absence in Text Catullus’ Sapphic Lacuna. A Palimpsest of Absences and Presences Speaking Aposiopeseis. The (Generic) Sound of Silence in Statius’ Thebaid* Allegorical Absences. Virgil, Ovid, Prudentius and Claudian Tamen apsentes prosunt pro praesentibus. Proxied Absences and Roman Comedy Absence Left Wanting. The Groove in Ovid’s Remedia The Gaze on the Void. Hermeneutic Responses to Dido’s First Appearance II. Absence in Context Speaking Silence in Cicero’s Brutus and Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus Et sine auctore notissimi uersus. Unauthored Poetry and Rome’s Authoritarian Turn Looking for the Emperor in Seneca’s Letters Marcus Aurelius: Medi()ations Not Medi(c)ations Lost in Germania. The Absence of History in Tacitus’ Ethnography Conspicuous Absence. Tacitus’ De Re Publica III. Going Beyond The Slave, Between Absence and Presence In Search of the Lost City. The Enduring Absence of Pompeii Omnibus umbra locis adero. Elena Ferrante and the Poetics of Absence The Philology of Grief. Catullus 101 and Anne Carson’s Nox Absence, Metaphysically Speaking. From Reception to Instauration? Afterword: Lights Out Bibliography