Interwoven Narratives Research Articles

Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Modern Europe (review)

Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, eds. Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Modern Europe. Publications of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Essays and Studies 13. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. 350 pp. $37.00. As its title suggests, this collection of essays examines the influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses in pre-modern and early modern Europe. The fifteen essays gathered here are arranged in roughly chronological order, and while the majority of these essays concentrate on the influence of The Metamorphoses in literature, a few essays explore Ovid's influence in other realms such as art, alchemy, and demonology. More importantly, while these studies acknowledge the historical and/or social factors that shaped these evolving interpretations of Ovid, nearly all of the authors provide us with a close reading of The Metamorphoses in its original context. In fact, this sort of intertextuality is one of the collection's primary strengths, as it renders current Ovidian scholarship accessible to readers from a variety of fields without requiring them to stretch to the very limit of their interdisciplinary skills. In the introduction, Keith and Rupp trace the reception of Ovid's Metamorphoses from his contemporaries to Ausonious, carefully noting both admiration for and condemnation of this influential work. Here, the variety of criticism stemming from Ovid's contemporaries, who simultaneously criticized the poet's narcissistic self-indulgence in rhetorical witticism while reserving praise for his interwoven narratives and the sheer scope of the poet's mythical encyclopedia hint at some of the complexities that face the modern Ovidian scholar. Coulson's essay on the variety of medieval commentaries on Ovid in cathedral schools opens the section on medieval interpretations of Ovid and represents an important addition to the existing body of knowledge concerning the manuscript tradition. Subsequent chapters concentrate on the Christianization of Roman ethics and morality in the Ovide moralise (Desmond) and the notion of metamorphosis in the works of Christine de Pizan (Akbari, Zalamea). Akbari's essay on metaphor and allegory in the Mutacion de Fortune is particularly instructive because she demonstrates how the very notion of metamorphosis was framed by medieval commentaries on Ovid. To round out the section on pre-modern readings of Ovid, English literature is represented by Chaucer's rewriting of Ovidian myth (Fumo) and the relationship between poetry and political discourse in John Gower's Confessio amantis (McKinley). The transition to Renaissance literature and poetry is accomplished by two provocative essays on Ovidian influence on contemporary cultural constructs, specifically alchemy (Willard) and demonology (Fox). …

The river of lost footsteps: histories of Burma

In The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant Myint-U tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family's history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling. His maternal grandfather, U Thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s. And on his father's side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma's Court of Ava for nearly two centuries. Through their stories and others, he portrays Burma's rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of British colonialism, the devastation of World War II, and a sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the longest-running war anywhere in the world.

Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire

The teachings of political theorist Leo Strauss (1899--1973) have recently received new attention, as political observers have become aware of the influence Strauss's students have had in shaping conservative agendas of the Bush administration--including the war on Iraq. This provocative book examines Strauss's ideas and the ways in which they have been appropriated, or misappropriated, by senior policymakers. Anne Norton, a political theorist trained by some of Strauss's most famous students, is well equipped to write on Strauss and Straussians. She tells three interwoven narratives: the story of Leo Strauss, a Jewish German-born emigre, who carried European philosophy into a new world; the story of the philosophic lineage that came from Leo Strauss; and the story of how America has been made a moral battleground by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Leon Kass, Carnes Lord, and Irving Kristol--Straussian conservatives committed to an American imperialism they believe will usher in a new world order.

Luther's Theology of Glory

Luther's bold contrast between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross is often interpreted as the key passage unlocking the door to his entire thought. In the famous theses 20 and 21 of the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Luther insists that only a theologian of the cross can comprehend.., the visible and manifest things of God, and can correctly call a thing what it is. 1 The knowledge of the Christian God is accessible solely at the place of God's deepest humiliation, the rock on which every human ambition for glory is shattered: in suffering and on the cross. 2 As the starting point for theological reflection, Luther's theology of the cross cannot be considered to exhaust all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ (Col. 2:3). 3 In this brief essay, I intend to show that, for Luther, a theologian deserving of this name can also be fascinated by the glory of the triune God. On the basis of Luther's explanation to the Creed in the Large Catechism, I suggest that Luther's theology of glory consists of two interwoven narratives of trinitarian glorification. Together, they can be illustrated as a double helix of glorification: God is glorified for who God is, as well as for what God does.

The Aztec palimpsest: Mexico in the modern imagination

Mexico is more than a country; it is a concept that is the product of a complex network of discourses as disparate as the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda. The idea of Mexicanness, says Daniel Cooper Alarcon, arisen through a process of erasure and superimposition as these discourses have produced contentious and sometimes contradictory descriptions of their subject. By considering Mexicanness as a palimpsest of these competing yet interwoven narratives, Cooper offers a paradigm through which the construction and representation of cultural identity can be studied. He shows how the Chicano myth of Aztlan was constructed upon earlier Mesoamerican myths, discusses representations of Mexico in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and analyzes the content of tourist literature, thereby revealing the economic, social, and political interests that drive the production of Mexicanness today. This original linking of seemingly incongruous discourses corrects the misconception that Mexicanness is produced only by hegemonic groups. Cooper shows how Mexico has been defined and represented, by both Mexicans and non-Mexicans, as more than a political or geographic entity, and he particularly reveals how Mexicanness has been exploited by Mexicans themselves through the promotion of tourism as a form of neocolonialism. Cooper's work is valuable both for identifying attempts to revise and control Mexican myth, history, and culture and for defining the intricate relationship between history, historiography, and cultural nationalism. The Aztec Palimpsest extends existing analyses of Mexicanness into new theoretical realms and provides a fresh perspective on the relationship between the United States and Mexico at a time when these two nations are becoming more intimately linked.