A quick run through some digital resources and tools: three for the Classically-minded and one for the creative reader – exploring intertextual parallels, scanning verse, making maps from text and interactive storytelling.
Not everything in a narrative helps the reader’s transportation into a storyworld. Sometimes a narrator reminds us that we’re not actually there at all. A preliminary exploration of aitia in the Argonautica, considering how they might affect a reader’s immersion.
Reading Experiments / Reading in Translation
by Tim Kenny
by Tim Kenny · Published April 29, 2017 · Last modified October 11, 2018
Inspired by Burroughsian ‘cut-up’, but more of a ‘mash-up’: two translated texts, one Latin and one Greek, two mythological narratives, and some intrusive narrators. Answers not included.
‘When he stretched the great bow into a circle, the bow twanged and the string rang out and the arrow leapt – sharp-pointed, eager to fall among the crowd.’ Thoughts on narrative duration using examples from Greek Epic: Gods, Archers and Stretching Time in the Iliad and Argonautica.
Stanzel, concerned with what the reader can fill in, makes a distinction between ‘spaces’ that can be filled with help from the text and ‘gaps’ in time and/or space which the reader must face alone – a post looking at indeterminacies in the Argonautica’s proem with the help of Stanzel, Iser and Sternberg. Complementary stories, reader-construction and narrative interest!
A return to allusive space. Fallible memory and fictional memory. Tracking weavers of text and following poetic threads in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; from the daughters of Minyas to the Fates, from Rome to Alexandria and back again.
Once upon a time in the wilds of Babylon, Thisbe saw a lion. But I saw three… An exploration of allusive space and what lurks within: Ovidian lions mixing with Theocritean lions merging with Catullan lions. How many intertexts make a pride?
Twine’s a user-friendly story-building tool that I’ve (mis-)used to make a short interactive reading experiment. The sample text (unsurprisingly) is taken from the Argonautica: A.R. 1.922-984, the Argonauts’ arrival at Cyzicus. Brave the island alone or call upon allies for advice – the choice, reader, is yours!
‘The locus demands I proclaim the virgin’s rape. You’ll recognise many things, and a few you ought to learn.’ Is ‘locus’ a location in space and is that space in the real world, on a page, or in the mind? Is ‘locus’ a point in time? Is it some when and where we have been before? How many things can fit in a ‘locus’?
An outline of a reader-oriented theory of the novel. Narratives have gaps, narratives are selective, narratives are sketches of a world. What is a reader to do with the indeterminacies? Fill them in!