After Ovid, after theory

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Ovidian poetry has stimulated and framed classicists’ engagement with philosophical ideas that have emerged since the mid-twentieth century, in the fields of critical theory, cultural studies and psychoanalysis. The multiform and palimpsestic dialogues that have grown out of this specific engagement seem to encapsulate the evolution not just of Latin literary studies but of classics as a discipline, in the wake of post-war, post-colonial thinking across the humanities. Of all the Ovidian ‘revivals’ through the twentieth century, beginning with Pound, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Picasso, Dali, Freud and Lacan in the 1910s-30s, the ‘third wave’ of the late 80s onwards (and the fashioning of a ‘postmodern Ovid’ in criticism, literature and visual art) has been by far the most expansive and the most problematic.1 It is this Ovid, an Ovid who in the second decade of the new millennium feels standardized and endlessly reiterable, but who is animated by contradictions, repressions, critiques, misreadings, and connections not quite made, who will be the focus of this essay. My discussion will be punctuated by speculative pointers towards new shores, just as the wave ebbs