Virgil's Cinematic Art

Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-764324-2
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 198 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 242 mm, Gewicht: 440 g

Virgil's Cinematic Art concerns the rhetoric of visual manipulation that provokes us to envision what is written on the page, treating visual details in ancient epic not as mere scene-setting information or enhancements to any given story, but as cues for performing specific imaginative processes. Through a series of close readings centered primarily on Virgil's Aeneid, Kirk Freudenburg shows that the experiential effects that Virgil puts into play do serious narrative work of their own by structuring lines of sight, both visual and emotive, and shifting them about in ways that move readers (interpellated as viewers) into and out of the visual and emotional worlds of the story's characters.

Studies of visualization in Latin poetry have tended to treat what is seen in epic as a matter of what is there to be seen, rather than an expression of how someone sees, treating images as mostly static. This study, by contrast, concerns the cinematics of ancient narrative: how words provoke an active, forward-moving process of experiential participation; poets not as verbal painters, but as projectors, purveyors of imagined happenings. Informed by cognitivist and constructivist studies of how audiences watch narrative films and make sense of what they are being given to see, Freudenburg locates new narrative content lurking in old places, brought to life within the imaginations of readers. The end result is a new approach to the question of how ancient epic tales convey narrative content through visual means.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Freudenburg, Kirk

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- Seeing with Eyes Tightly Shut

- Two Worlds in Dialogue: Film Analysis and Classic Narratology

- Chapter One: Introducing Suture

- Tracking Turnus: Visual Pursuit

- Watching Paris: Hatred at First Sight

- Sightings, First and Last: the Insect Similes of the Aeneid

- Chapter Two: Precedents in Earlier Roman Poetry

- Getting High with Lucretius

- Vertical Relations

- The Grammar of Angles Taken

- The Other Side of High: Positioning Pathos

- Chapter Three: Seeing as Telling

- The Temple Ecphrasis of Aeneid 1

- Aeneas the Neoteric

- Duces Feminae: Fade to Dido

- Image Pairs: the Catullan Background

- Caving in to Desire: Dido's Wedding Parade

- Chapter Four: Imagery as Understory

- Dido's Visual Feast

- Picturing Virgil's Words: Dido in the Middle

- Golden Dido

- On Keeping Dido Unfathomable

- Girl on Fire

- Chapter Five: Imagery as Counternarrative in the Death of Camilla

- Imagining Camilla

- Tracking Prey with Camilla

- Dressed to Kill: Clothing as Fire-starter, Again

- The Death of Camilla as a Life Fully Lived

- One Last Look: Visual Counternarrative, and the Humanness of Virgil's 'Heroes'

- Appendix of Classic Film Edits

- Works Cited

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Kirk Freudenburg is Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics at Yale University. His previous publications include Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire.