Loving Writing/Ovid's Amores

Description

This book offers a fresh reading of the Amores centered on the aggressive, opportunistic, endlessly fluent, pleasure-seeking character, the poet-lover of the collection, here called Naso. Resisting the scholarly tendency to segregate the poet from the lover, Ellen Oliensis teases out the compromising affiliations between Naso's most 'poetic' performances and his seamy erotic adventures and shows that his need to write the script of his own subjection, far from delegitimizing his desire, tallies with other features of his generally masochistic profile. The book concludes with an exploration of the masochistic pleasures of the elegiac writing project as such, thereby effectively re-uniting Ovid with his surrogate within the collection.

Ellen Oliensis is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge, 1998), Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry (Cambridge, 2009), and assorted essays on ancient poetry.