Classics Archives - a dynamic reader

How to read dreams: narratological and stylistic analyses of Metamorphoses 4.27

Tim Kenny — Sun, 17 May 2020 15:30:32 +0000

Trapped in the bandit lair, a young woman narrates her dream. How do we read it? How does she intend us to read it? By supplementing my narratological tool-kit with a borrowed stylistic one, I map out the transitivity processes, instances of agency and density of evaluative language involved in the construction of her (dream-)world.

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Death in the Iliad: Reports and Responses

Tim Kenny — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 10:55:07 +0000

‘She had told the lovely-haired maids in her house to set a great three-legged cauldron over the fire, so there could be hot water for Hektor’s bath when he came home from battle – poor child, she did not know that far away from any baths bright-eyed Athene had brought him down at the hands of Achilleus’.

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‘Breast is Best’? Rereading Catullus 64.18

Tim Kenny — Sun, 26 Aug 2018 13:41:06 +0000

Negotiating a neologism in Catullus 64. Is ‘nutrices’ a point of ingress into a world of myth (and art), an intertextual trigger, a distraction cloaking a temporal and thematic shift, a narrative device utilising the male gaze? All these and more?

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Speakers and Speeches in the Argonautica: Running the Numbers

Tim Kenny — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:40:23 +0000

When characters in narrative fiction engage in direct speech, we read via a narrator’s quotation the perspectives, thoughts, and interpretations of those characters on events (past, ongoing, and prospective) in the storyworld in which they operate. And when they don’t speak? We might have difficulty reading them.

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Adjusting the dynamics of narrative interest: an experiment on Lemnos

Tim Kenny — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 11:02:24 +0000

‘Suspense thus essentially relates to the dynamics of ongoing action; curiosity to the dynamics of temporal deformation.’ Some thoughts on the ordering of exposition in the Argonautica's Lemnian episode and how reordering might affect a reader’s experience and interpretation of the narrative.

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What’s in a ‘locus’? Some notes on Fasti 4.417-8

Tim Kenny — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 18:11:47 +0000

‘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’?

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