Professor Willett,
Doesn't the extraordinarily high degree of patterning that we find,
both in Virgil's appropriations of Homer and in his own fairly
systematic internal echoing of his own corpus, establish a high degree
of spatalizing in his own conception of the poem?
I know that Renaissance poets thought in intensely spatial terms. Not
all numerological readings are convincing, but some are indisputable,
and they demonstrate a degree of patterning that is not only spatial but
mathematically sophisticated almost beyond belief. Evidently they did
all this without reading Frank, so I wonder if this kind of reading can
really be as historically suspect as you suggest.
David
>>> [log in to unmask] 5/25/2007 9:36 AM >>>
David Wilson-Okamura wrote:
> Steven J. Willett wrote:
>> Augustan poetry was written for recitation, not silent reading, and
>> even centuries after Vergil's time, it was like Homer studied by
>> recitation. Synesius of Cyrene has a delightful passage, in one of
>> his letters, where he describes a summer afternoon in the garden
when
>> his son and a friend were practicing their Homer by reciting
passages
>> to each other. The application of a spatialized technique to such
>> works will inevitably distort them, no matter how practical it may
be
>> for padding the CV.
> I've often wondered about this. But let's not get trapped by our own
> metaphor, which spatialization is. The question, I think, is whether
> these works were made to be read, as Carol Kaske says,
> "concordantially." My sense, from reading ancient commentary, is that
> there was LESS of this, but far from NONE. For us, "close reading" is
> bread and butter, but for Servius, it's just another thing you can
do,
> and not always the most interesting or most persuasive.
This is quite true, especially after the codex replaced the papyrus
roll, but I was speaking specifically of the Augustan poets. They
wrote
for recitation or possibly, in the case of lyric, chanting or singing.
They weren't creating texts that require a spatial critique. Of course
we can do anything we want in handling a poem, the poets aren't around
to grouse, but a little caution would seem to be in order.
--
Steven J. Willett
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