“Not the Lover’s Choice, but the Poet’s”: Classical Receptions in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Dépasser la frontière - Frontière.s ◽

10.35562/frontieres.258 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Benjamin Eldon Stevens

Keyword(s):

Lived Experience ◽

18Th Century ◽

Central Position ◽

Roman Poet ◽

Portrait Of A Lady ◽

Jeune Fille ◽

Looking Back

Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019) tells its 18th-century story of love and loss in part by retelling an ancient story, the myth of the poet Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice, as related by the Roman poet Ovid in his epic Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE). The myth’s most iconic moment, when Orpheus turns around to look at Eurydice and therefore loses her to Hades, occupies a central position in the film’s plot and underlies its running theme of ‘looking at’ as ‘looking back.’ By changing certain aspects of the myth – replacing poetry or singing with painting, making both main characters women, and having them alternate between the two main mythic roles – Portrait does not so much update the ancient story as debate its meanings. What does it mean to lose someone beloved but gain their image? How is every loss a kind of death, and in its train, the life that remains a kind of afterlife? Most generally, what are the links among lived experience, memory, and art? By raising these questions via the ancient myth, Portrait meditates on the effect of making, as Orpheus did, “not the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.”

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Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th-18th century)

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300002722 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 79-95 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Antonella Romano ◽

Stéphane Van Damme

Keyword(s):

History Of Science ◽

18Th Century ◽

World History ◽

Global Dimension ◽

Central Position ◽

Social Approach ◽

The Past ◽

History Of ◽

Intellectual Networks ◽

Circulation Of Knowledge

Through its focus on the question of circulation, world history attained a central position amongst the historical configurations in the last decade. Indicative of our fundamentally changing world, the past thereby reveals itself to have been shaped by commercial, human and intellectual flows of global dimension. The history of science has been particularly receptive to such methodological developments, especially with regard to works influenced by a markedly social approach to science and knowledge, which has focused for some time on the analysis of intellectual networks. From the French provincial Enlightenment to Athansius Kircher's circles—including the relationships of patronage of mathematicians and court philosophers—social, intellectual and epistemological configurations have been designed, allowing us to consider different scales in the circulation of knowledge.

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The Culture of Travel in Edo-Period Japan

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.72 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Robert Goree

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Lived Experience ◽

Travel Literature ◽

Publishing Industry ◽

18Th Century ◽

17Th Century ◽

Japanese Culture ◽

Edo Period ◽

The Road ◽

Woodblock Printing

The expansion of travel transformed Japanese culture during the Edo period (1603–1867). After well over a century of political turmoil, unprecedented stability under Tokugawa rule established the conditions for men and women from all levels of the hierarchical society to travel safely for purposes as varied as the cultural consequences of a country increasingly on the move. Starting in the first half of the 17th century, institutionalized forms of compulsory travel for the highest-ranking samurai and a limited number of elite foreigners made for conspicuous political spectacle and prompted the Tokugawa shogunate to develop and maintain an extensive system of roads, post-towns, checkpoints, and sea routes. Prompted by the economic prosperity of the Genroku era (1688–1704) in the late 17th century, an ever-growing portion of the population, including commoners from cities and villages, took advantage of newfound leisure to embark on journeys for pilgrimage, medical treatment, and sightseeing. This change was accompanied by the expansion of tourism, which grew into a sophisticated commercial enterprise in the 18th century. Poets, writers, painters, performers, and scholars took to the road throughout the Edo period for artistic and intellectual pursuits, often as teachers or students, generating and spreading culture where they went. With an astonishing output of travel literature, guidebooks, maps, and woodblock prints featuring landscapes, a thriving commercial publishing industry, which first blossomed in the Genroku era, used woodblock printing technology to popularize travel in increasingly diverse ways. Together with such influential forms of print, the things that people wore, packed, bought, enjoyed, and rode while traveling formed a rich body of material culture that reveals the lived experience of travel for the duration of Tokugawa rule.

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La epístola Eloisa to Abelard de Alexander Pope y sus traducciones e imitaciones en Francia en el siglo XVIII

Çédille ◽

10.25145/j.cedille.2021.20.24 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 515-535

Author(s):

Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero ◽

Keyword(s):

18Th Century ◽

Alexander Pope ◽

First Person ◽

Roman Poet ◽

English Poet ◽

Free Translation

This paper examines the «birth» of works in the tradition of the Heroides in France in the 18th century, originating with the various translations that the epistle Eloisa to Abelard (1717), by Alexander Pope, spawned. The English poet, following in the footsteps of the Roman poet Ovid, would compose a 366-line poem based on the story of the star-crossed lovers Abelard and Eloisa. A poet much admired and imitated in France, his epistle would circulate extensively amongst writers in the country, being imitated and translated both in verse and prose. The author who would contribute to the expansion and development of the poetic subgenre of works following the legacy of the Heroides in France would be CharlesPierre Colardeau, with his Lettre d'Héloïse à Abailard, a free translation of M. Pope, a work published in 1758. His translation would make popular a new kind of «lettre en vers», «épître héroïque» or «élégie», as these poems were termed, which featured expressions of passions and sincere feelings by their characters, who wrote in the first person, moving readers.

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The dialogue between the poet’s pure soul and nature: transformation, interpretation and translation

Accents and Paradoxes of Modern Philology ◽

10.26565/2521-6481-2017-2-7 ◽

2017 ◽

Keyword(s):

Lived Experience ◽

18Th Century ◽

Human Life ◽

Living Organism ◽

Human Beings ◽

Natural Laws ◽

Late 18Th Century ◽

Allegorical Interpretation ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

The Universe

The dialogue between the Poet and Nature includes discussion of pure Soul with pure Reason since the late 18th century. The literary discussion was based on thesis of infinite and antithesis of the final human nature. Literary personifications and comparisons characterized a personality temperament as a type of universal nature and psychophysical parallelism. The Greek concept of cyclical time has been problematical for philosophers and poets and became concept of epoch in the work about Seasons, where Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn symbolized the human life: birth, death, maturity and decline. The nature is represented in poetry on both directions vertically and horizontally. There also existed a tradition of allegorical interpretation of soul from pagan myths. Metamorphoses of soul have been observed in the mythopoetical paradigm of “death and life” including a medieval motif of tragic incompatibility between Man and God. In ancient tradition the universe and the natural laws are personified in allegorical terms, and the earth is represented as a giant living organism. The later poetry is similarly intended to illustrate these ideas assimilated into the concrete lived experience. Since the 19th century attention was given to human beings and to the soul in dissolution with nature.

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