Mario Erasmo, Reading Death in Ancient Rome
Chicago, Ohio State University Press, juin 2008
257 p.
Isbn (ean13) : 978-0-8142-1092-5
Présentation de l'éditeur:
“This book is beautifully written and impeccably researched. Itshould have a very wide audience and appeal to scholars working in thetraditional areas of philology, archaeology, history, art history andanthropology, as well as the emerging field of mortality studies.”—Eric Varner, Classics and Art History, Emory University
In Reading Death in Ancient Rome, Mario Erasmo considers bothactual funerary rituals and their literary depictions in epic, elegy,epitaphs, drama, and prose works as a form of participatory theater inwhich the performers and the depicters of rituals engage in strategiesto involve the viewer/reader in the ritual process, specifically byinvoking and playing on their cultural associations at a number oflevels simultaneously. He focuses on the associative readingprocess—the extent to which literary texts allude to funeral and burialritual, the narrative role played by the allusion to recreate a fictiveversion of the ritual, and how the allusion engages readers' knowledgeof the ritual or previous literary intertexts.
Such a strategy can advance a range of authorial agendas by invitingreaders to read and reread assumptions about both the surrounding Romanculture and earlier literature invoked through intertextualreferencing. By (re)defining their relation to the dead, readers assumevarious roles in an ongoing communion with the departed.
Reading Death in Ancient Rome makes an important andinnovative contribution to semiotic theory as applied to classicaltexts and to the emerging field of mortality studies. It should thusappeal to classicists as well as to advanced undergraduate and graduatestudents in art history and archeology.
Mario Erasmo is associate professor of classics, University of Georgia.