#dissertationblogging

[lurking-latinist]

re: these tags

THAT'S SO COOL AHHHH!! good for you aubreyad community stays winning

[introducing this with a disclaimer in case i'm wrong about everything: i am only halfway through the series rn (just about to finish 10) and also am but a mere undergrad classics major who has yet to even declare said major and I probably don't have the right to be yapping about propertius. nevertheless i shall.]

anyway i have been growing persistently more insane about diana's proximity to a Lot of classical imagery, like how her first appearance in post captain is literally during a fox hunt + all the gender stuff she has going, obviously linking her to mythological diana (and artemis if we're going to conflate the two) but your take has sent me in a whole new direction with that-- because she doesn't actually really embody the artemis archetype all too much overall (an emphasized character trait being that she's notably Not Chaste) EXCEPT in relation to stephen, w/ whom her relationship is much more brotherly than it is sensual i guess?

which would align very well with your idea of diana as elegiac puella-- sort of in a way being mythologized by stephen-- resulting in the reader actually being able to see two different manifestations of her character (one through the eyes of an omniscient prosaic narrator and one through the perspective of stephen as a "poet" figure). and i just think that's neat.

my latin class has also been looking at a few of propertius' love elegies and, at least to me, they read a lot like if stephen 1.) hated himself significantly less and 2.) were less indecisive in writing about his Feelings?? 1.8 (and all of the poems concerning cynthia moving/traveling away and propertius being all moody about it) is very reminiscent of the arc from post captain to the surgeon's mate imo. 1.12 is also Literally Him-- "cynthia prima fuit cynthia finis erit" can be compared to stephen's poetic catastrophizing about how his life is Literally Over and Love Is Dead when he believes to have fallen out of love with diana!?!? i'm going to lose my mind.

sorry for dumping all of this on you unprompted and also sorry for the fact that it probably does not make sense. peace and love

if undergrad classicists don't talk about propertius literally WHO WILL. (genuinely my currently-being-written phd dissertation chapter is based on an idea I had in the class I read propertius in freshman year. never feel like you're not a 'real scholar' or something yet, because you honestly never do become something different, you just keep reading and talking and this is what we do! there's nothing realer than this!)

oh wow that's really well put--we kind of get to see her from an omniscient-narrator perspective and through the eyes of her lover who is Not Being Normal About Her. very nice!

yeah I keep reading bits of propertius and being like "hmm is po'b going to quote this one I wonder." (he doesn't mostly but I keep thinking he should. because I want the aubreyad to be denser and less accessible I guess? :P) there's a lot of catullus woven in too of course - I associate Catullus 72 with the 'falling out of love' arc (my dude that is not what falling out of love looks like).

oh gosh yes 1.8 -- that was one of the things I was trying to describe to Distinguished Classicist, the way she's so -- what's the word I want? not volatile... she disappears. she's constantly Gone. you turn around and oops, she's eloped to Sweden. (honestly though if Cynthia and Propertius could manage to have *fake* revenge affairs that would actually be *great*, for them that would be an improvement.) Gareth Williams (in a chapter called, amazingly, "From Grave to Rave") describes Cynthia as "ever only elusively visible in the narratological mist" and I feel like that's a bit what's going on with Diana. For her there's a genre element as well--she's a woman in the Men Going to Sea books, and even though the Aubreyad gives way more time to women than the average Men Going to Sea book, the fact is the camera frequently simply isn't on her. We see far more of Stephen thinking about her, hearing rumors, etc. than we do of her actually being on the page. Now in elegy nobody seems to be quite fully on the page, we only get "fragments of story" as Genevieve Liveley and Patricia Salzmann-Mitchell say (excellent collection by that name btw, I recommend checking it out if you're at all interested in narrative and lyric/elegy). But Diana manages this while being in a novel, which is impressive to me.

yeah stephen as a character is a lot more... self-reflective? than propertius' speaker. for one thing he's in a novel, I think, so he can actually... have a series of contiguous experiences. he's also a compulsive diarist which is helpful for self-reflection I guess. and more mature, like, as a human being, than propertius' speaker, who apparently does nothing with his life except be in love and write poetry, he doesn't exist outside of as a poetic voice whereas, again, stephen benefits from a third-person narrator and has medicine and spying to do and so on. also he's Catholic.

I love the "Catullus-and-water" line, it's like O'Brian just put in a little wink to those of us who would notice this, like, "yes I am doing this on purpose." All in all I've pretty much defaulted to assuming that O'Brian is doing things on purpose. although he did forget Babbington's first name that one time and retconned it very awkwardly

[finelythreadedsky]

so i initially posted this after seeing a production of medea where the kids playing medea's sons let out absolutely bloodcurdling screams from backstage as they were being killed, and i was wondering if ancient theatre had any sort of reassurance equivalent to curtain calls, where the modern audience sees the dead get up and walk to the front of the stage and smile and bow.

and whether or not there's any sort of post-performance acknowledgement of the actors, this kind of does happen within the plays themselves-- the audience listens to the vivid description of the death of pentheus and is asked to imagine the actor's body horrifically violated and torn to pieces, but the presence of that same body on stage belies the reality and finality of that death. even after the audience possibly sees ajax kill himself right in front of them on stage, they see him walk right back on as teucer. the doubling of roles creates some of the same effect as a curtain call does, in viscerally impressing that those killed in the play are not really dead, that it's the characters and not the actors who have been brutalized.

EXCEPT in the case of children, who in ancient theatre are played by extras and do not double roles. when medea's children die, they're gone for the rest of the play and probably the rest of the trilogy. the audience never sees them again. that's the end for those actors as well as their characters.

lying awake at night wondering whether ancient theatre had bows or curtain calls

[procyonvulpecula]

Dissertation status: possibly finished by tonight??

[lurking-latinist]

in my time-travel dissertation?!?

[lurking-latinist]

me every single day: oh woe alas alack I cannot possibly write my self-assigned 500 words I will never have another idea again and also everything I have already written is meaningless

*actually opens the book I am writing on*

*actually rereads where I left off writing yesterday*

*writes my self-assigned 500 words*

I am gradually learning from this process but I have not yet reached the point of being able to skip the initial woe and agony

[lurking-latinist]

this dissertation would be so much easier if I could just say "like in Unnatural History"

[lurking-latinist]

step 1: come up with a thesis statement that you think might be true

step 2: become convinced that it can't possibly be

step 3: while writing the paper, discover that there actually is evidence for it

I am enjoying step 3

[lurking-latinist]

just noted in a document that I am 'mining' my dissertation prospectus for sentences/paragraphs/explanations that I want to reuse in the dissertation itself

does this make me... a prospect-or?

[lurking-latinist]

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[lurking-latinist]

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[lurking-latinist]

making notes for my current Lucan chapter in the copy I used for my undergraduate thesis on Lucan which still has all my notes from then in it… eventually this will just be a palimpsestic record of my readings of Lucan

[lurking-latinist]

Your blog is one of those giant red-yarn conspiracy boards and it takes up all sides of a room but in the middle is a comfy couch where you're calmly drinking tea

i see you've been following #dissertationblogging

[lurking-latinist]

me: maybe if I work on my dissertation reading my brain will consent to do something other than come up with more hornblower posts

the book I am reading:

Simon Hornblower Bibliography Jumpscare

[lurking-latinist]

fic and academic writing are truly truly the same thing for me. My #1 besetting fault as a fiction writer is that my characters are constantly Looking and Gazing and Glancing as if they were composed entirely of eyes and now a bit of my dissertation has turned out to be about The Gaze.

Oh well if Catullus can get away with describing a character standing in one place looking at her departing beloved and thinking about their past, maybe I can too

[lurking-latinist]

the whole of my initial notes on a key book on my topic

[lurking-latinist]

I just want to show dr who to the Roman poet Lucan

I specifically think he would enjoy a) the one where River breaks time and b) Vengeance on Varos