Book Reviews by Aaron Kachuck
Part cabinet of curiosities, part literary-historical critique, this book makes a strong case tha... more Part cabinet of curiosities, part literary-historical critique, this book makes a strong case that the socio-cultural, intertextual, scientific and political complexity of certain misanthropic hybridised hominid monsters helped Augustan poets discuss poetry and its ends. Through a rich succession of innovative, intricate readings of monsters in the poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid, L. further clarifies, often with greater textual and historical nuance than ever before, the sense that Augustan 'monstrosity' reflected and innovated very specific gendered (and often medicalised) stereotypes, with male monsters like the Cyclops and Hundred-Handers generally typified by their strength and epic scale, female monsters like the Harpies and Scylla, by contrast, by their (grotesquely sexualised) miasmic ooze of liquids and emotions. Taken as a whole, this book represents an extensive, if not exhaustive, Roman teratypology that will prove a valuable resource for the study of Augustan culture and pre-medieval monster-theory, even as it falls short of making the stronger case that there might be something monstrous not only within, but about, Augustan poetry itself.
Papers by Aaron Kachuck
Classical Receptions Journal, 2021
This article puts the bear back in Horace, demonstrating the role bears have played from antiquit... more This article puts the bear back in Horace, demonstrating the role bears have played from antiquity through the Renaissance as the great disruptor of the classical literary artefact, simplex et unum. The first section of the article treats bear's place in ancient poetics. The second section exposes its role in Horace's corpus, demonstrating how it instantiates both historical interpretive conflicts over one of Aristotle's definition of the poet's vocation and a wide range of Roman cultural and literary developments in the late first-century BCE. The third and final section finds Horace's bear stalking Renaissance artes poeticae and starring as the unstable genre-crossing centre of Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale' (1611). This article shows that Shakespeare's bear has as much to do with the history of poetics (and the War of the Poets) as with the material history of stagecraft, which has often been the intriguing focus of scholarship on the bear. In addition to heightening our sense of the monstrous qualities of Augustan literature, and to troubling our notions about the classicism of classical literature, this article clarifies how classical poetics could function, in its own time and thereafter, as both analytic field and a literary genre sui generis.
Births, Rebirths, and Horace's genius : A Study of Odes IV, 11, 2019
This paper gives a new account of Roman birthday-cult and the genius in the works of Horace. Hora... more This paper gives a new account of Roman birthday-cult and the genius in the works of Horace. Horace’s implicit theology of genius, it argues, related the public sphere of the nascent State (itself buttressed by birthday cult) to the private sphere of his relationship to Maecenas, and to the solitary sphere of his relationship to himself. At its core, this paper solves two problems raised by his final birthday-poem, Odes IV, 11, «The Blood-Offering Problem » and «The Birthday Problem » . In revealing Horace’s identification of his births and rebirths with those of Maecenas, this paper illuminates Horace’s novel coordination of cosmos, imperium and the individual, in ways that clarify his poetry, his new political theology of empire, and the history of birthday cult.
Translation and Literature, 2020
Books by Aaron Kachuck
The Solitary Sphere in The Age of Virgil, 2021
Aaron Kachuck, The Solitary Sphere in The Age of Virgil, Oxford University Press, 2021
Talks by Aaron Kachuck
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Book Reviews by Aaron Kachuck
Papers by Aaron Kachuck
Books by Aaron Kachuck
Talks by Aaron Kachuck