ABSTRACT Until recently, scholars have often assumed that in his exile writings, Ovid abandoned myth and the mythical method of composing poetry; yet it was only his way of creating cultural myth that underwent a metamorphosis. This article argues that in Elegy 10 of Book III of the Tristia, Ovid is not documenting the literal conditions of his exile in Tomis (Dobrudja), but rather constructing the myth of a land of eternal winter bereft of love. This myth is the product of his literary imagination, nourished by the topos of frozen, fearsome Scythia as it appears in Greco-Roman literature (Herodotus, Xenophon, and Virgil). Ovid had already revealed his antipathy toward this region in the Metamorphoses, long before he was relegated there. The cultural myth of a land of unending frost—an externalization of his wounded, emotionally frozen inner world, plunged into an abyss devoid of love—emerges in the Tristia as a carefully wrought, multidimensional, and symbolically rich creation of universal scope. It is a myth that renders exile as a realm of solitude, alienation, and fear (locus horridus). Within this myth, Ovid shapes a catastrophic vision of the world fatally paralyzed by frost: the cosmic death of all nature, stripped of life and love.
ABSTRACT This article attempts to characterize and typify the poetic potential of phrases that take the form of “x of x” or “x’s x.” While some, like “heart of hearts,” are prevalent in everyday discourse, examples are drawn primarily from American modernist poet E. E. Cummings, whose poetics relied on this rhetorical formula and who used it extensively and creatively throughout his poetry for multiple poetic goals. To account for the wide range of uses and functions of “x of x,” they are divided into three main types, gradually increasing in poetic qualities: the basic genitive, like “the hope of hope,” entails a recursive structure and a sense of self-containment and potential for infinity; the superlative genitive, like “queen of queens,” entails a hyperbolic intensification of the x; and the cryptic genitive, like “the ears of my ears,” entails a teasing out of a vague, metaphorical term x that seems the essence of the literal x.
ABSTRACT Traditional scandal theory focuses on the role of affect in scandalization phases but has overlooked the bodily and cognitive dimensions that initiate and sustain scandalization. This article offers a rhetorical and narratological analysis that proposes a new conceptual tool for literary scandal theory. It introduces the phenomenon of performative disgust which refers to the verbal expression of physical, emotional, and cognitive revulsion to moral transgressions in literature. In the 1890 reception of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” two distinct response waves emerged: an initial wave of embodied and affective disgust, followed by cognitively articulated emotional repulsion. The article conducts a discourse analysis of contemporaneous newspaper articles, interpreted through a new historicist as well as a cognitive and embodied narratological lens. It illustrates how performative disgust serves as a strategy that seeks to counter moral provocations in literature. Rather than producing empirical data, this study develops and applies a theoretical framework to inform literary scandal theory by highlighting that the expression of bodily, affective, and cognitive responses is integral to collective processes that shape communication about moral values for (late nineteenth-century) readers.
This article provides a critical discussion of Lisa Zunshine’s monograph The Secret Life of Literature in the context of her previous scholarly publications as well as relevant research in psychology and related fields. Renown for her contributions to cognitive-evolutionary literary studies, Zunshine’s new project, like her previous work, focuses on theory of mind (also known as mindreading or folk psychology); in this offering, she emphasizes how intuitions about other minds shape reader and audience interactions with the arts. Highlighting the strength of Zunshine’s international range of example literary texts and her valuable attention to cultural differences and political operations, this review essay suggests that both comparison to other arts and a more detailed engagement with the enactivist perspective endorsed in Secret Life would augment the value of this nevertheless valuable book.
