[SydPhil] UOW Agora Speaker Series – Professor Marco Formisano – Thursday 11 April, 3.30pm, 20-4

[Elena Walsh]

Dear all,


The next Agora Speaker Series talk at the University of Wollongong will be
given by Professor Marco Formisano of Ghent University, in Building 20-4,
April 11 at 3.30pm. All welcome!

*Arachne or the Metamorphosis of Labor*



Abstract:



Arachne, one of the most widely discussed figures in Ovid's metamorphic
universe, has often been seen as one of many Doppelgänger of the poet.
Particular attention has been devoted to the contest between the highly
talented Maeonian girl and Minerva: their respective tapestries have been
read as manifestos of different poetics. This talk focuses on Arachne
herself as a worker, proposing two interrelated points. Firstly, she is
punished by the goddess in a particularly ingenious way because her work as
a weaver is now deprived of the significance of art and reduced to pure
labor, which is the bodily necessity of a spider but bearing no meaning.
Secondly, Arachne, although she fully masters her art, audaciously but
consistently refuses to identify with the profession of a weaver. Minerva's
punishment re-establishes the balance: as a spider, Arachne is compelled to
weave by a natural necessity, reducing her will to an endless but
meaningless activity that leaves no room for her intellectual aspirations:
her imaginative work ends up being only pure labor.



Bio:


Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin literature at Ghent University. He
has published on late antique literature, early Christian martyr acts,
ancient technical and scientific texts, Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* and its
reception. Editor of the series “sera tela. Studies in Late Antique
Literature and its Reception” (Bloomsbury, London) and of “The Library of
the Other Antiquity” (Winter, Heidelberg). Currently he is the principal
investigator of the research project “Coming After. Late Antique
Ecopoetics”, funded by FWO (Research Foundation, Flanders), and the creator
of “Titubanti Testi. Binomio di lettura”.

Warm regards,

School of Liberal Arts

-- 

*Dr. Elena Walsh*

Lecturer

School of Liberal Arts

Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities | 94.19

University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia

*T *+61 2 4220 5692

*W *elenawalsh.squarespace.com
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