Thursday 9 March 2023, 1pm - 2pm
Self and m(Other) in the poetry of Ovid
Frances Myatt (Classics)
Chair: TBC
The meeting will be held on Zoom: please contact Christina Rozeik to receive the Zoom details.
Speakers and abstracts
Self and m(Other) in the poetry of Ovid
Frances Myatt (Classics)
“I start from the question of what would have to change were we to take seriously the notion that a ‘person’ could normally, at least always potentially, become two.”
(Christine Battersby)
As Battersby suggests, the potential two-in-oneness of the female body – and the fact that every individual has issued from within the body of another human being – radically challenges the traditional male-orientated conceptions of the ‘self’ in Western philosophy that suppress the role of the mother. In this paper, I shall explore how the Roman poet Ovid uses the physical connection between mother and child to place stress on the boundaries between bodies in the Metamorphoses and the Tristia. We shall see that Ovid not only uses pregnancy and childbirth to challenge the distinction between self and other upon which the Roman conceptual universe was based, but that his focus on the mother’s perspective also pre-empts 20th century psychology by some 2,000 years.
Frances Myatt is a second-year PhD student in Classics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where she is researching pregnancy and childbirth in the works of Ovid under the supervision of Professor Philip Hardie. After her first degree at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, she spent a year at Harvard, followed by a Masters in AVL (Comparative Literature) at LMU, Munich. Frances’ research interests include the relationship between bodies and literature, Augustan poetry, and classical reception.
The Early Researchers Seminar Series (ERSS) is a platform for PhD Students and early career researchers (ECRs) at the University of Cambridge with research foci on reproduction to share and discuss their research with other academics from a range of disciplines also researching reproduction at the University. Seminars are held on Zoom on the second Thursday of every month, 1pm - 2pm. For more information, and for the full 2022-2023 programme, please see the main ERSS page.