‘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’.
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?
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.
‘Prototypically, narrative involves not only a temporal sequence into which events are slotted in a particular way, and not only a dynamic of canonicity and breach; more than this, stories represent – and perhaps make it possible to experience – what it is like to undergo events within a storyworld-in-flux.’
Reading Experiments / The Reading Experience
by Tim Kenny
by Tim Kenny · Published October 10, 2017 · Last modified July 1, 2023
‘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.
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.
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?
‘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’?