Making Mockery
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Description
Making Mockery explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Roman poetry, and argues that poets working with such material composed in accordance with shared generic principles and literary protocols. It encourages a synoptic, synchronic view of such poetry, from archaic iambus through Roman satire, and argues that if we can appreciate the abstract poetics of mockery that governs individual poets in such genres, we can we better understand how such poetry functioned in its own historical moment.Rosen examines in particular the various strategies deployed by ancient satirical poets to enlist the sympathies of a putative audience, convince them of the justice of their indignation and the legitimacy of their personal attacks. The mocking satirist at the height of his power remains elusive and paradoxical--a figure of self-constructed abjection, yet arrogant and sarcastic at the same time; a figure whose speech can be self-righteous one moment, but scandalous the next; who will insist on the "reality" of his poetry, but make it clear that this reality is always mediated by an inescapable movement towards fictionality. While scholars have often, in principle, acknowledged the force of irony, persona-construction and other such devices by which satirists destabilize their claims, very often in practice--especially when considering individual satirists in isolation from others--they too succumb to the satirist's invitation to take what he says at face value. Despite the sophisticated critical tools they may bring to bear on satirical texts, therefore, classicists still tend to treat such poets ultimately as monochromatically indignant, vindictive individuals on a genuine self-righteous mission. This study, however, argues that that a far subtler analysis of the aggressive, poeticized subject in Classical antiquity--its target, and its audience--is called for.
Reviews
"Rosen offers a fascinating study of the evolution of the genre through a sequence of representations, literary, and material. This book will spark new approaches in scholars working right across the comic spectrum." --Cedric Littlewood American Journal of Philology
"This is an unusual book in several ways. It deals with both Greek and Roman literature. It integrates iconography into a text-centered discussion. It shows knowledge of a correspondingly vast secondary theory out of its analyses of a wide variety of poems and passages, and thus shows how theory is possible within a philological and historically organized discourse." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Rosen makes a fascinating case for a 'poetics of mockery' that avoids moralistic simplicities and probes the complex strategies adopted by ancient satirists to engage their audiences. By subtly unpicking the performative conventions, tropes, and narrative ruses through which ridicule is transmuted into poetry, this book raises the discussion of ancient satire and its cultural dynamics to a new level of critical sophistication."--Stephen Halliwell, University of St. Andrews
"In this highly innovative, rich and impressively broad-ranging study, Rosen offers the first genuinely synoptic examination of the phenomenon of poetic satire in Greco-Roman antiquity.... Scholars working in any number of disciplines, from myth to genre studies, art history to literary theory, will find this a stimulating and lucid work and one that fills a too long outstanding gap in our understanding of the ancient poetic tradition."--Deborah Steiner, Columbia University
"This is an exceptionally rich study of mockery as a telling, and always problematic, social practice in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Besides tackling the diachronic development of various genres of mockery practiced from Homer to Juvenal, this study details the theorizing of those genres by those who practiced them, and by the many critics, both ancient and modern, who have struggled to come to terms with those practices and, above all, to take them seriously. But the illicit pleasures of mockery are never under-represented by this book, for Rosen is especially good at cracking open the many synchronic puzzles that the ancient materials pose, to expose satire's dirty secrets in ways that bring to life the particular characters and events and the larger culture wars that are the matrix of satiric invention."--Kirk Freudenburg, Yale University
About the Author(s)
Ralph Rosen is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
