The CAMWS (Classical Association of the Middle-West and
South) annual meeting 2015 took place this last weekend in Boulder. Four full
sessions on the first day of papers treated the reception of classics kept me
busy for a very instructive day. The next day featured two further sessions,
nearly four more hours!, in the afternoon. While not all paper-topics in these
sessions pertain to the reception of classical mythology, every one taught me
something new. The papers that fit into the scope of the MythMatters blog
receive here some commentary, even if they deserve much more. The abstracts for
the papers are published at camws.org.
Meredith E. Safran (Trinity College) talked about “The
Heraklean and Promethean Protagonists of Supernatural
(2005-2015).” I learned from Safran to regard Supernatural as a “post 9/11 narrative”. Having watched a grand
total of one episode of the CW series, I could still follow Safran’s detailed
explication of how characterization of the one Winchester brother manifests
systematic allusion to the traits of Heracles from Greek mythographical
sources. The classical Heracles’ famously voracious appetites for food and sex
play subtly into the character of the monster-slaying protagonist. Numerous
details were presented in Safran’s compelling treatment. All the way from his
near-miss brush with death in the cradle to his consumption of ginormous
sandwiches, according to Safran, the character is drawn with intentional
similarity to Heracles. Prometheus got somewhat shorter schrift; but, I quite
enjoyed learning about the numerous characters in Supernatural whose attributes involve the great Titan’s willful
recalcitrance. Even though she presented
less information about the one episode of Supernatural
I know — I watched “Remember the Titans” (season 10, ep. 13) for its
Prometheus content, because current myth student Danielle Orrock’s spectacular
paper— Safran dealt with this particular episode in Q&A.
Polly Hoover (Wright College) read a paper about “Theo
Angelopoulous’ The Traveling Players and
the Transformation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.”
This is a film I have never seen, but its usage of the Orestes myth was
presented in an engaging way. The play-within-the film, a traveling production
of a drama called “Gorgo the Shepherdess”, brings together several elements of
an oresteia, and the film’s narrative frame has only one character named after
the mythological Tantalids. Others assume roles like unto Aegisthus, Agamemnon
and so forth.
Yasuko Taoka (Southern Illinois University) treated compelling
questions of mythological reception in her paper “Reception and Pastiche in
Peter Milligan’s Greek Street.” Taoka
showed that the creator of the graphic novel Greek Street raises matters of reception in a rather sophisticated
way. As gritty and off-putting as Milligan’s unpleasant style may be, the
narrative includes characters who know their classical mythology. And Taoka
left the audience reconsidering whether a low-brow façade can front a useful
mythological reception. One wonders whether the reader to whom the cartoon’s
sleaze and gore will appeal most is going to care about the high-brow ideas
Taoka introduced today. I think she is raising serious question about the
groundrules for reception studies. Whether I will dig deeper into the Greek Street narratives, I have to admit
that today’s paper made me think. 
Summer Trentin (Metropolitan State University of Denver)
walked us through Raphael’s fresco cycle on Cupid and Psyche in the Chigi Villa
Farnesina. “Apuleius and Intellectualism in Raphael’s Loggia of Psyche” was a
well illustrated talk. Even if Trentin’s pictures were primarily available in
public domain online, it was still delightful to walk virtually through the Psyche
cycle with a trained expert. Q&A brought out some detail pertaining to the
specifically named Neo-Platonism that the presenter had grouped into the rubric
of “intellectualism” during the paper.
I regret that another commitment kept me from hearing Sarah
G. Titus (University of Washington) discuss “Socrates, Fénelon, and Kauffman:
negotiating identity through common experience”. It was reported as a very fine paper.
The 1699 didactic prose work Les avantures de Télémaque by François
de Salignac De La Mothe-Fénelon was tremendously influential in the 18th
Century in Europe and then secondarily in 19th-century America. It
is a myth built neo-classically into the narrative space Homer and the
classical tragedians left wide open, namely the experiences of Telmachus after
the Odyssey’s conclusion. Familiar
faces from Homer are there: Idomeneus, Nestor (again), Athena (though called
Minerva, of course), the Sirens, and many others are all here.
The panel on recent literary reception of the classics capped the afternoon quite nicely, with a session of five good papers. Catherine M. Schlegel (University of Notre Dame) explicated “Auden’s Homer: ‘The Shield of Achilles.’” Sarah H. Nooter (University of Chicago) read “The Loss of telos: the Oresteia of Athol Fugard.” This paper left me thinking that I will have to examine connections between Fugard’s play and Tug Yourgrau’s Song of Jacob Zulu, which I addressed in an earlier Mythmatters blogpost. Though Sarah Ahbel Rappe (University of Michigan) was unable to attend, her paper was read in absentia: “Teaching ‘Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition’ as a Course in the State Prison System” is a personal experience of Rappe’s reading classical tragic texts with convicted felons in the Michigan penal system. Remarkably, many of these women have experienced first-hand the very unspeakable crimes that the classical tragedians narrate. Especially because a student in my myth course last week told me that Medea-like crimes “statistically never happen,” Rappe’s account was personally moving for me.
Finally, the afternoon’s most passionate paper was delivered
by Carolin Hahnemann (Kenyon College): “Translucent Transplants: on the sublime
similes in Alice Oswald’s Memorial.”
Hahnemann demonstrated intimate familiarity with the formidable 2012 poem.
Because Oswald’s poem focuses on the mythological elements of Homer’s Iliad, the poem deserves to be included
in the OGCMA’s next edition. Hahnemann has been lecturing much on Oswald’s
rather innovative reception of Homer and the Troy War myth. Let’s call it OGCMA1047NOTTrojanWar_Oswald.
On Friday, an entire session treated classical reception in
music. And the topics were broadly divergent. Byron Stayskal (Western
Washington University) presented on “Innovation and Tradition: Charon in the
Libretto of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo.”
Robyn M. Rocklein (Ringling College of Art and Design) treated “Distortions of
Dejanira: visions of female virtue in Handel’s Hercules (1745). And David T. Hewett (University of Virginia)
introduced me to the remarkable mythological depth of the band Genesis during
the 1970s especially: “Forever to Be Joined as One: Genesis’ ‘The Fountain of
Salamacis’ and Ovid.” Other songs by the band in their formative years manifest
classical mythological sophistication. Educated schoolboys knew their myths and
worked them into their albums and stage shows.
Friday’s session of papers on reception in film had a
surprisingly small audience, perhaps because the springtime weather was so
fine. Chris Ann Matteo (Fairfax County Public Schools) argued from an
anthropological interpretation that Baz Luhrmann’s treatment of Orpheus
reenacts the Dionysiac sparagmos
(ritual dismemberment of the poet). In “Dissecting Orpheus in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!” Dr. Matteo considers the
songs of the film’s soundtrack as artistic dismemberments of their originals,
wrenched from their original contexts and significantly altered in style or
intent.
In another paper Scott A. Barnard (Rutgers University)
sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the filmmakers, who have been for a
decade now the target of narrow-minded classicists’ pedantry. The author looked
for and provided evidence of truly Homeric details in “Authentic
Inauthenticity: Homeric resonance in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004).”
O Brother, Where Art
Thou has taken on new meaning for me, because of the paper by Ryan C.
Platte (Washington University in St. Louis) called “Scholarly Feedback: homeric
studies and American song culture in Coen Brothers Films.” He argues that that film
narrates the musical event called the first folkmusic revival. Homer’s
historical bearing, at the transition between oral and written culture, makes
his Odyssey narrative especially apt
for the vehicle for telling it. Likewise, in another Coen Brothers film,
matters of folk music are addressed and, again, the Odyssey is the narrative frame. Platte’s paper now has me looking
for all manner of electrical innovations that populate the visual landscape of
Coen Brothers’ sophisticated film. But his interpretation of the “stringing the
bow” episode is for me the most persuasive part of Platte’s paper.
Rocki Wentzel (Augustana College) offered commentary on a
less-than-obvious mythological paradigm in one of my favorite mythological
films in “Beyond Pygmalion: the writer as Narcissus in Ruby Sparks.”
And in “Politics and Violence in Jorge Alí Triana’s Edipo Alcalde,” by Prof. Annette M.
Baertschi (Bryn Mawr College) the remarkable Chilean film was analyzed in a
sensitive treatment of the film’s violence. The paper was more about Creon,
perhaps, than about Jocasta’s incest. [The Mythmatters reader(s) may recall my
blogpost about Edipo Alcalde’s
gut-wrenching Jocasta narrative.] For me the most valuable part of Baertschi’s
paper, the detail I will anticipate most eagerly prior to publication, is her
documenttion of Nobel-laureate screenwriter Garcia Marquéz’ preoccupation with
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex throughout his
career and correspondence. The film is absolutely worth further study, and Baertschi’s
interpretation will play an important role in classicsists’ understanding it.
Finally, the conference ended on a reception high-note, when
George Frederic Franko (Hollins University) offered a paper that seemed to me
more about Shakespeare than about Ovid. “Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe: lamentable
new comedy,” was a highlight of the conference for me, especially because
Franko has clear control of the Sahkespearean context as well as the Ovidian
text. Because I was presiding as the session where he spoke, I was able to tell
Prof. Franko how much I enjoyed his insightful paper. in the blogpost, I can
only encourage the reader(s) to go and consult Franko’s abstract, and all the
many others, at camws.org.
—— RTM, 29 March 2015
