It seems that just about every age is an age of Ovid.  As did the Roman poet himself, early modern and contemporary adapters of Ovid told stories to raise questions, many of them circulating around issues of poetic authority, violence, voice, sexuality, and gender.  While still attending to those Ovidian concerns, this course will pay especial attention to the ways bodies and landscapes (and waterscapes) seem to have no fixed boundaries; we will draw upon the contemporary field of ecopoetics to think about these human-environment relations. Ecopoetics breaks from a more traditional nature writing by foregrounding the potential violence and destruction in the human-ecosystem encounter, especially in the Anthropocene.  Both Ovid and early modern poetry work really well from a theoretical model that explores the border crossings between the environment and the human subject; The Metamorphoses begins “My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange!”  Those transformed forms often mingle the human and the non-human, a central concern in the theoretical field of ecopoetics. 

    The readings will explore ecopoetics in theory and in Ovidian practice.  Theoretical readings will introduce the field of eco-poetics, and include selections from Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter; Lowell Duckert’s For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes; Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, Thinking with Water; and Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean.  We will read literature with an eye and ear for the concerns and formal strategies of Ovid’s poetry and its importance to English language literature, mainly looking at the early modern but also looking at some contemporary poetry—three different “ages of Ovid.” We will read, of course, The Metamorphoses, and we will also read parts of The Heroides and The Amores.  Renaissance authors will include Marlowe, Lyly, Drayton, and Shakespeare, as well as selections from Todd Borlik’s 2019 Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology. Readings from Shakespeare will include A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Titus Andronicus and two longer poems: A Lover’s Complaint and Venus and Adonis.  Twentieth-century Ovidian lyric will include the 1994 anthology After Ovid, a few excerpts from Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, and Alice Oswald’s 2012 Dart. 

    I think this course would appeal to anyone interested in poetry, classical reception, and/or the theoretical fields surrounding the environment.  I also think this could appeal to local teachers, as Ovid is a most teachable author, and there’s enough Shakespeare in here to help build up your teaching options there.