Thread: Joseph Hall
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Unread 04-17-2018, 08:14 AM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
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I'm reading Kirk Freudenburg's collection of essays on Roman Satire, and thought this an interesting tidbit to think about how satirical poetry differs, in many ways, from lyric:
Compared to writers working in other genres, Rome’s verse satirists are unusually expressive when it comes to laying out the genealogies of their works. They do this by inviting us to look into their bookbags to see what they have been reading. This is to put the satirist’s legendary frankness to work at the level of his theoretical discussion. But it is also a necessary means of helping us place their works in reference to all the varied traditions that satire includes. For as the ancient lanx satura (“heaped plate”) metaphor suggests, satire is less a thing in itself than it is a momentary, willed coherence of discrete materials cobbled together, this and that, messily contained.
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