In B. Acosta-Hughes, J. Arthur-Montagne, and P. Vasunia, eds., Hellenistic Literature and Culture: Studies in Honor of Susan A. Stephens (London: Bloomsbury Academic), pp. 284-98, 2024
[Uncorrected proofs.] The Aeneid’s image of Iarbas is part of a larger transculturation of imperi... more [Uncorrected proofs.] The Aeneid’s image of Iarbas is part of a larger transculturation of imperial symbolism; the image of royal legitimacy in an Egyptianized African king is itself enmeshed in the Roman reception and contestation of Hellenistic monarchical discourse.
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In K. Seigneurie and I. Ramelli, eds., A Companion to World Literature, vol. 1 (Chichester and Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2020), pp. 549-59.
"The ISIS monument preserves meaning that could always surface in a dialogue with the flag on top; in fact, the very collaboration of flag and stone compromises the former as much as the latter. They would do better just to knock the obelisk down as they did the Temple of Bel in Palmyra and so many other reminders of the homage once paid by those in power to the ancient gods.
"By even publishing a glossy magazine full of graven (or at least pixeled) images, ISIS goes down a dangerous path. Pictures, like words, cannot have fixed meaning; they are fundamentally intertextual and depend for their meaning on context and perspective, which cannot always be controlled. ISIS’s chosen media, the internet and social networks, embody and enable this intertextuality, and the seductive potential of Photoshop to juxtapose, recompose, and substitute exacerbates that risk of pluralism. The seams — the incongruity between the obelisk and the flag, like the misaligned mihrab in Hagia Sophia — will always find their counterparts in the disparate perspectives latent within the viewer’s own self and activate a stream of suggestive metaphors in place of an abiding monism.
"The very nature of the cover image forces ISIS into an unaccustomed position. Their image-makers can’t make their point with a blank piazza; they need to alter rather than annihilate, and in altering — leaving a little of the old — they have compromised their message. Their submission to the semantics of images remakes their ideology into something like iconophilia. Pictures lead to perdition."
In K. Seigneurie and I. Ramelli, eds., A Companion to World Literature, vol. 1 (Chichester and Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2020), pp. 549-59.
"The ISIS monument preserves meaning that could always surface in a dialogue with the flag on top; in fact, the very collaboration of flag and stone compromises the former as much as the latter. They would do better just to knock the obelisk down as they did the Temple of Bel in Palmyra and so many other reminders of the homage once paid by those in power to the ancient gods.
"By even publishing a glossy magazine full of graven (or at least pixeled) images, ISIS goes down a dangerous path. Pictures, like words, cannot have fixed meaning; they are fundamentally intertextual and depend for their meaning on context and perspective, which cannot always be controlled. ISIS’s chosen media, the internet and social networks, embody and enable this intertextuality, and the seductive potential of Photoshop to juxtapose, recompose, and substitute exacerbates that risk of pluralism. The seams — the incongruity between the obelisk and the flag, like the misaligned mihrab in Hagia Sophia — will always find their counterparts in the disparate perspectives latent within the viewer’s own self and activate a stream of suggestive metaphors in place of an abiding monism.
"The very nature of the cover image forces ISIS into an unaccustomed position. Their image-makers can’t make their point with a blank piazza; they need to alter rather than annihilate, and in altering — leaving a little of the old — they have compromised their message. Their submission to the semantics of images remakes their ideology into something like iconophilia. Pictures lead to perdition."
invokes the ruins of Rome as part of the site of friendship and mourning. I explore here the relationship of these various, interrelated types of loss with the Classical past that each poem, in its engagement with Virgil and in its very Latinity, is in some measure implicitly making present, and (following literary historians who, since Harrison, note Milton’s echoes of Castiglione’s poem here) I read the Epitaphium Damonis as a response to Alcon.