RIMELL, Victoria,
The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics. Empire's Inward Turn.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (...), 2018. 1st paperback ed. XI,358p. Paperback. 'This book is about how space determines thinking, and the spatial references found in Roman literary texts of early imperial date. (...) As the author claims in her introduction, 21st-century humans obsessively visualize enclosed spaces that provide an illusion of safety, protection, retreat and invisibility, but at the same time are just as interested in the freedom and unconfined possibilities, or even the chance of conquest, associated with wide-open spaces. Narrow spaces cannot, however, be imagined only as safe places, but also as loci of confinement, torture and captivity, and vice versa: vast landscapes are loci of exposure, danger and homelessness. Victoria Rimell’s book analyzes these polarities of interior and exterior spaces in well-known Roman literary texts. (...) Rimell’s various poststructuralist analyses raise fundamental questions about method. The so called ‘spatial turn’ has influenced the Humanities and social sciences in fundamental ways, but has so far found only a relatively weak following in classical literary studies. The question at stake in the book is whether such a spatial reading of the best-known Augustan and imperial literature can reveal the sinews (a metaphor by the author) of these literary works. Can the new perspectives offered by the ‘spatial turn’ bring out richer and deeper meanings than we saw before? What do Virgil, Horace or Seneca gain if we concentrate our attention on the spatial configuration of their works? The term ‘spatial turn’ can signal a wide range of methods and theories. Most scholars, especially from the social sciences, use it simply for a geographical (instead of national or temporal) approach to social phenomena. For too long, they argued, research has dealt exclusively with time, without taking its link to spatiality into account. Rimell uses the term in a narrower sense. The spaces analyzed in this book are constituted mostly by cultural practices; she shows how social, economic, political and cultural phenomena are both the agents and products of spatial reality. (...) The author’s practice abolishes the strangeness of the Roman texts, placing them within a general system of Western spatial thinking. The limitation of the scope of investigation leads necessarily to a deeper understanding of the subject: this book provides a lot of new intuitions and reveals a series of new and importantly constituent characteristics of the discussed texts, and Roman and modern thinking. (...) Modernity is not a quality inherent in things. Since classical scholarship has to find its place within the permanently changing system of the contemporary humanities, it must also permanently question its own standards and transform itself constantly: failing to do so, it will be marginalized. Victoria Rimell’s book is a move in this game of adaptation, the result of dialogue between Classics and contemporary theory. Its methodological impulse — a reading method defined by Derrida and deconstruction is applied to texts of Roman literature — comes from outside Classics, but Rimell’s implementation of it is a highly professional piece of classical scholarship. This book, extremely rich in thought and cultural intuition, enriches the interpretative tradition of the texts and also our notions of what scholarship should be. The Enclosure of Space in Roman Poetics is essential reading for researchers of early imperial Roman literature.' (ATTILA FERECZI in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.10.26).
€ 37.00
(Antiquarian)