Pseudo-Lucian’s Cnidian Aphrodite: A Statue of Flesh, Stone, and Words

The aim of this paper is to analyse a literary response to antiquity’s most alluring work of art, the Cnidian Aphrodite. It argues that the ecphrasis of the statue in the Amores develops textual and verbal strategies to provoke in the recipients the desire to see the Cnidia, but eventually frustrates this desire. The ecphrasis thereby creates a discrepancy between the characters’ aesthetic experience of the statue and the visualisation and aesthetic experience of the recipients of the text. The erotic mechanisms of the ecphrasis, simultaneously arousing and frustrating the recipients’ desire, mirror the effect of the statue on its viewers and disclose the erotic programmatics of the whole dialogue. The analysis shows that the Amores surpass the ongoing discourse on love from Plato’s Phaedrus to the ancient novel – and Achilles Tatius and Longus in particular. The Amores, like the nude statue of the Cnidia, threaten to cross all bounds of decency in sexuality.

THE SYSTEM OF CHARACTERS IN THE NOVEL IN VERSES «PARTHANDRE AND GLAPHYRA» BY V. GORYANSKY

Роман в стихах Валентина Горянского «Парфандр и Глафира», следуя схеме античного романа и мещанской драмы, содержит размышления о поэте и поэзии в духе «Евгения Онегина» и «Домика в Коломне» Пушкина. Анализ структуры персонажей позволяет реконструировать замысел романа. В нем важно различие не только между автором и лирическим повествователем, но и лирическим повествователем и идеализируемым им чистым лириком, равно как и отношения двух главных героев подчиняются и логике символов (времена года, сны, увлечения), и строению речи. Оба героя недостаточно красноречивы по разным причинам, но, вовлекая друг друга во влияние своих речей, они окончательно самоопределяются как поэтическая личность и прозаическая личность. При этом тема эмиграции меняется по ходу действия: от утраченного рая до той позиции, которая позволяет оценить не только самостоятельность героев, но и их культурное самоопределение. Тем самым эмиграция оказывается способом пересоздать отношения между чистой лирикой и сюжетной лирикой и тем самым понять границы самоопределения поэта в ХХ веке. Это позволяет поставить роман в стихах «Парфандр и Глафира» в один ряд не только с подражаниями «Евгению Онегину», но и с такими памятниками лирического самоопределения, как «Лодейников» Заболоцкого и «Спекторский» Пастернака. The novel in verses «Parthandre and Glaphyra» by Valentin Goryansky, following the scheme of the ancient novel and bourgeois drama, contains reflections on the poet and poetry in the mood of «Eugene Onegin» and «House in Kolomna» by Pushkin. The analysis of the structure of the characters allows one to reconstruct the idea of the novel. There, it is important to note the difference not only between the author and the lyrical narrator, but also between he lyrical narrator and the pure lyricist idealized by him. Parallel to the relations of the two main characters, they obey both the logic of symbols (seasons, dreams, hobbies), and the structure of speech. Both heroes are not eloquent enough for various reasons, but involving each other in the influence of their speeches, they are finally self-defined as a poetic person and a prosaic person. At the same time, the theme of emigration changes in the course of action: from the lost paradise to the position which allows us to evaluate not only the independence of the heroes, but also their cultural self-determination. Thus, emigration is a way to recreate the relationships between pure lyrics and plot lyrics, and thereby understand the boundaries of the poet’s self-determination in the 20th century. This allows us to put the novel in verses «Parthandre and Glaphyra» on a par not only with imitations of «Eugene Onegin», but also with such monuments of lyrical self-determination as «Lodeynikov» by Zabolotsky and «Spektorsky» by Pasternak.

Finding the Time for Ancient Novels

This essay looks at the history of the novel, starting from the influential postwar critical insistence on the importance of the novel as a nineteenth-century genre. It notes that this tradition singularly fails to take account of the history of the novel in antiquity–for clear ideological reasons. It then explores the degree to which the texts known as the novel from antiquity, such as Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, Petronius's Satyricon, or Heliodorus's Aethiopica, constitute a genre. Although there is a great deal of porousness between different forms of prose in antiquity, the essay concludes by exploring why the ancient novel, ignored by critics for so long, has now become such a hot topic. It argues that much as the postwar critics could not fit the ancient novel into their histories, now the ancient novel's interests in sophisticated erotics, narrative flair, and cultural hybridity seem all too timely.

Making an Ass of Yourself in Narrative

Through close readings of literary asses in Sterne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Clare, this chapter argues that the development of sympathetic animal representation is marked by an ambivalence emblematized by the figure of the donkey. The chapter outlines the donkey’s ambiguous cultural status, discussing narratives from two different traditions: the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the meek ass is revered for its lowliness, and the classical tradition in which it is scorned. The biblical story of Balaam’s ass, in which the ass speaks against her master’s cruelty, is interpreted literally in the eighteenth century as teaching compassion to animals. In Apuleius’ ancient novel The Golden Ass the narrator, transformed into an ass, is a low, lustful, stupid beast. Both narratives influence the eighteenth-century donkey representations discussed here. The writers’ tonal complexities are traced to the fear that to sympathize with animals is to be transformed, like Apuleius’ narrator, into an ass.

Inventing the Novel

This chapter offers a brief account of how Bakhtin conceived of the ancient novel in the 1930s, asking whether his work provides a proper theoretical underpinning for any historical approach to the genre and, given such an approach, how narrative evolved in antiquity. Although written some fifty years earlier, Bakhtin’s essays on ancient literary history were unavailable in English until collected and translated in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Although not literally new, these essays are novel both to many students of fiction precisely because Bakhtin focuses his discussion on antiquity—the significance of which for the novel, he argues, has been “greatly underestimated”—and to classicists besides because these scholars are unlikely to know the studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais for which Bakhtin first became known in the West.