LESS CARE, MORE STRESS: A RHYTHMIC POEM FROM THE ROMAN EMPIRE

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

Hollywood Animation, Late Modernity and Contemporary America

One of the primary distinguishing features of post-1990s Hollywood animation is its foregrounding of contemporary culture and society. While many of the ‘classic’ Disney films are set in fantastical or fairy tale landscapes geographically and temporally removed from everyday life (‘once upon a time…’), most animated features from the early 1990s onwards are self-conscious artefacts of late modernity. There are two primary manifestations of the foregrounding of contemporary culture in post-1990s Hollywood animation. The first, and most immediately visible, is (a usually comic) intertextuality that takes the form of an intensified referentiality to other works of popular culture and modern life more broadly. The second form is that of social commentary, which is often satirical in nature and tends to be a more abiding thematic focus than the intertextual allusion. This chapter argues that both forms serve a similar function: they are strategies of proximation that anchor films to recognisable and identifiable situations and events.

Menelaus in the Archaic Period

The figure of Menelaus has remained notably overlooked in scholarship on the major heroes and heroines of Homeric epic. This book studies the Homeric character through a multidisciplinary approach to his depiction in archaic Greek poetry, art, and cult, providing a detailed analysis of ancient literary, visual, and material evidence. It first examines the portrayal of Menelaus in the Homeric poems as a unique ‘personality’ with an integral role to play in each narrative, as depicted through typical patterns of speech and action and through intertextual allusion. The book then explores his representation both in other poetry of the archaic period and also archaic art and local Sparta cult. Ultimately, Menelaus emerges as a unique and likeable character whose relationship with Helen was a popular theme in both epic poetry and vase painting, but one whose portrayal evinced a significant narrative range, with an array of continuities and differences in how he was represented by the Greeks, not only within the archaic period but also in comparison to classical Athens.

Quam Romanus honos et Graia licentia miscent

This chapter discusses Statius’ celebration of the beauty and serenity of Campania felix in contrast with Rome in Silv. 3.5. It demonstrates how the poet slyly enhances his assurances to his wife that their cultivated but modest daughter will find a more suitable husband in Naples by a series of witty intertextual allusions to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to contrast Neapolitan refinement with the lascivious pleasures of the Roman theatre and Circus Maximus. The cultural fusion of Naples merges harmoniously with the refined complexity of Flavian poetry. A network of ingenious intertextual allusion draws together Virgil’s narrative of Hercules entering Evander’s humble cottage and Statius’ Hercules who accepts modest hospitality, but appreciates the opulent temple built by Pollius (Silv. 3.1).

“A Vision for the End of Days”: Deferral of Revelation in Daniel and at the End of Mark

An important clue to the meaning of Mark 16,8 has not received adequate attention. The verse is an intertextual allusion to Dan 10,7. Daniel 10–12 establishes a pattern of revelation, concealment, and future revelation, in which the resurrection of the dead is apocalyptically deferred – its truth not confirmable until it happens at the end of days. A similar pattern of concealment and revelation characterizes Mark’s gospel. At the end of the gospel, the resurrection of Jesus is announced (and so revealed) in story time, but further concealed in discourse time. In the act of narrating, the message is once again revealed. With the omission of a resurrection appearance, however, the vision of the risen Lord remains concealed until the revelation of the Son of Man at the parousia.

Opening the Folds: A Pastoral Vanguard

Chapter 5 considers the ubiquitous presence of pastoral literature and art in the late modernist milieu of The Jargon Society by examining its role and function in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Thomas A. Clark, and Simon Cutts. Far from perpetuating the common perception of pastoral as an idealistic, nostalgic, or escapist aesthetic mode, Finlay, Clark, and Cutts’s use of pastoral, it is argued, demonstrate a more knowing understanding, and innovative appropriation, of its complex tradition. In particular, it is suggested that pastoral provides these poets the means for reflecting on the materiality of the poem and for articulating the poetics of the printed format that it takes. Furthermore, due to its close links with Epicureanism and its dense weave of intertextual allusion, chapter 5 shows how pastoral presents an insightful analogy for the social dynamics and collaborative vanguard spirit of the remote small press networks that Finlay, Clark, and Cutts have participated in.

Intertextual Illuminations: “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Malcolm Lowry’s “Through the Panama”

The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his literary output. What Lowry stresses in his intertextual allusion is the perilous illumination that the eponymous lighthouse keeper experiences. The article contends that the condition of the lighthouse keeper anticipates that of the Lowry protagonist who in “Through the Panama” fears death by his own book, or, to take Lowry’s other phrase, being “Joyced in his own petard.” Basing her analysis on Mieke Bal’s idea of a participatory exhibition where the viewer decides how to approach a video installation, and can do so by engaging with a single detail, Filipczak treats Lowry’s text as a multimodal work where such a detail may give rise to a reassessment of the reading experience. Since the allusion to the Polish text has only elicited fragmentary responses among the Lowry critics, Filipczak decides to fill in the gap by providing her interpretation of the lighthouse keeper’s perilous illumination mentioned by Lowry in the margins of his work, and by analyzing it in the context of major Romantic texts, notably the epic poem Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz whose words trigger the lighthouse keeper’s experience, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose text is quoted in the margins of “Through the Panama.” This choice allows to throw a different light on Lowry’s work which is also inhabited by echoes of futurist attitude to the machine and the Kafkaesque fear of being locked in one of the many locks of the canal “as if in experience.”

Where did the Mirror Go? The Text of Plato [?] Alcibiades I 133c1-6

At Alcibiades I, 133b-c, the reader expects, but does not according to the MSS find, the return of the mirror-motif that had supposedly explained the true meaning of the Delphic injunction. Hence it remains unclear why anything viewed within the soul should act in any way that resembles a mirror. I argue that the substitution of a single letter in one word, about which the manuscripts and modern scholars in any case disagree, can restore the necessary reference to a reflective surface, though not specifically to a mirror, since the term for a mirror could only be applied to sight. A failure to understand the underlying intertextual allusion to Cratylus 408c had resulted in a safe but unsatisfactory substitution by Late Antiquity, and other modifications followed thereafter in an effort to give meaning to the text.