Reading Soundly

The Workshop will discuss three articles that are forthcoming or in progress:
The first, “Principles of Sound Reading,” which will appear in Sound and the Ancient Senses (edd. Shane Butler and SaraNooter), due out later this year, offers a close reading of the famous storm scene at the start of Vergil’s Aeneid, with particular focus on a single, richly sonorous line. Adducing parallels from elsewhere in Vergil, as well as from Homer, Aratus, Pacuvius, Lucretius, and Cicero, and exploiting the insights of recent theorists of sound, I look for answers to an ancient question: What is the relationship between the sound of poetry and the sounds represented in and by poetry?
The second, “Is the Voice a Myth? A Re-Reading of Ovid,” forthcoming in A Voice as Something More (eds. Martha Feldman and Judith Zeitlin), explores the tragic and violent story of Philomela in order to mount a critique of the Lacanian understanding of voice presented by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More.
The third is a short, speculative piece about a letter in which Cicero asks about the “chatter” of the young daughter of his friend and frequent correspondent, Atticus. I use the exchange to consider how much our own philological instincts and desires really depend, in the end, on “words.”
Shane Butler is Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

If you are planning to participate, please, contact Birgitta v. Mallinckrodt.