… don't get on too well with each other, going back to my German Lit. teacher in high school.
I'm having a bad case of criticismophobia right now, reading all these essays on Ovid, and two separate introductions to the Metamorphoses. 'foregrounded,' 'closurally,' and 'gendered' are bad enough, but what about this?
"… In particular, a return to Kristeva's notion of intertextuality as a way of 'orienting the text to its sociohistorical signification' via the ideologeme, i.e. 'the communal function that attaches a concrete structure (like the novel) to other structures (like the discourse of science) in an intertextual space' would seem a healthy antidote to the enervated concept of intertexuality as a kind of glamorous but non-political version of literary history that prevails in Latin literary studies." (Thomas Habinek, Part III of "Context and History," chapter "Ovid and empire" in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid.)
At least ideologeme is explained …
Don't get me wrong, the above book has been very helpful to better understanding Ovid, his work, and his influence on later generations. I don't mind looking up terms such as proem, narratology, neoteric, and liminal, and among themselves these gentlemen can talk whichever way they want; however, a series that is aimed at the reasonably educated reader – or so I thought – should be, in my opinion, more carefully edited. But then I look at the description of Cambridge Companions to Literature, and we are talking about 'accessible introductions' and 'appeal to' or 'meet demand' from students:
"Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers. Together the chapters add up to a systematic critical account of, for example Plato, Luther, Jane Austen, Tom Stoppard or Stravinsky, the French Novel or Jewish American Literature, and each book is supported by reference features such as a chronology and guide to further reading. Companions have colonised several fields within Humanities. The first two titles - Companions to Shakespeare and to Chaucer - were published in 1986. They were commissioned to meet a demand from students who wanted reasonably priced critical books that offered a variety of viewpoints rather than a single, idiosyncratic voice. From those beginnings we now have over 130 titles in Literature, over 60 in Philosophy and plenty more on musical, classical, religious and artistic topics. We have moved beyond single figures to offer Companions to literary and artistic genres and periods, musical instruments, and modern European cultures. Companions are designed not only to offer a comprehensive overview of their chosen topic, but to display and provoke lively and controversial debate."
So maybe the two are not reconcilable (grumble).
An earlier lament. (Is a curmudgeon gendered or not?)
Along the way though, I also learned two other bits of rhetorical terminology: suasoria and ethopoeia.
