Browsing by Subject "Ovid"

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    A Commentary on Ovid's Ceyx and Alcyone Narrative (Met. XI.410-748)
    (2015) Kim, Young Eun

    This thesis seeks to analyze the longest story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, tale of Alcyone and Ceyx. Despite its length, its placement within the entire work, and the presence of the work's eponymous hero, Morpheus, the Alcyone's and Ceyx' story has no major commentary in English and has earned little attention from most scholars. What has been written on it often scants the darker details of the episode, persuaded that Ovid has here sketched a portrait of an ideal, happy marriage, albeit one crossed by circumstances. In order to counterbalance this overly optimistic reading, this commentary carefully analyzes the language, motifs, and intertextual references that thread through Ovid's version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story. Particular attention has been paid to: the ambiguities in Ovid's narrative of Alcyone's attitude towards parting from her husband; the story's portrait of the gods, including Alcyone's own father, Aeolus; allusions to the earlier epic tradition (Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid) in the Tempest scene; and the ecphrasis of the House of Sleep, including the character of Morpheus. This analysis will show that the tale of Alcyone and Ceyx is not a simple encomium to marital fidelity, but a picture of conjugal love darker than most Ovidian scholars have suspected.

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    "Am not I your Rosalind?": Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
    (2008-12-01) Liu, Aileen
    "'Am not I your Rosalind?': Negotiating Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's As You Like It" argues that the theatrical self-masquerade, that rare and uniquely Shakespearean moment in which a character explicitly plays a version of him or herself onstage, is an ideal site to explore the intersection of language, identity, and transformation. The self-masquerade foregrounds the intimate relationship between language and subjectivity, by enabling characters to fruitfully exploit language in order to imagine, stage, and enact their own identity constitution and transformation. Although many Shakespearean characters participate in disguise-making, only Rosalind (As You Like It) and Prince Hal (1 Henry IV) have the linguistic and imaginative capabilities to perform a self-masquerade. While the disguise relies upon overtly donning a costume or otherwise changing one's appearance to conceal a "true" identity, the self-masquerade does not feed off of the ignorance of others to generate the power and persuasiveness of its fiction. Just as the audience must participate in the fiction-making that occurs whenever they enter the space of the theater, the self-masquerade draws other characters onstage into its imaginative circle as active participants. The self-masquerade is not initiated by a simple announcement, nor indicated by a mere change in clothes, but instead must be perpetually enacted through language. Engaging with Jacques Lacan, Lynn Enterline, Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Cavell, Valeria Finucci, Stuart Hall, Garrett Sullivan, Jean-François Lyotard and others, I argue that As You Like It goes beyond Shakespeare's earlier work to suggest that everyone has the capacity, via the self-transformative and self-constitutive power of speech, to enact genuine agency over their self-constitution and self-transformation as they like it.