Through the collaboration of ND Rome and the Medieval Institute’s Religion and Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean Working Group, we are pleased to announce a talk by Cynthia Liu, Junior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. A specialist in Greco-Roman poetry, Dr. Liu’s research spans a vast expanse, from poetry’s relationship to religion in the ancient world, to the reception of Greco-Roman literature in the early modern period. At ND Rome, she will be sharing her research on intellectual interactions between Chinese scholars and European Jesuits in the sixteenth century. An abstract of her talk is provided below.
Abstract
One of Classical literature’s most well-known features is the epic simile. Literary critics of Homer and Virgil have long discussed the way epic similes, by nature of their temporal and geographical non-specificity, bridge the world of the poem and the world(s) of the audience by playing on the coexistence of similarity and difference. At the same time, similes allow readers to map local and temporal specificities into the dynamics of the simile, and thus writers-as-readers find these dynamics especially live in imitation. In this paper, Dr. Liu will discuss the way simile-in-imitation compounds and complicates the tensions between similar and different in early modern Latin epic that sought to bring the Far East to Europe.