Virgil's Cinematic Art : Vision As Narrative in the Aeneid

Virgil's Cinematic Art concerns the rhetoric of visual manipulation that provokes us to envision what is written on the page, treating visual details in ancient epic not as mere scene-setting information or enhancements to any given story, but as cues for performing specific imaginative processes. Through a series of close readings centered primarily on Virgil's Aeneid , Kirk Freudenburg shows that the experiential effects that Virgil puts into play do serious narrative work of their own by structuring lines of sight, both visual and emotive, and shifting them about in ways that move readers (interpellated as viewers) into and out of the visual and emotional worlds of the story's characters. Studies of visualization in Latin poetry have tended to treat what is seen in epic as a matter of what is there to be seen, rather than an expression of how someone sees, treating images as mostly static. This study, by contrast, concerns the cinematics of ancient narrative: how words provoke an active, forward-moving process of experiential participation; poets not as verbal painters, but as projectors, purveyors of imagined happenings. Informed by cognitivist and constructivist studies of how audiences watch narrative films and make sense of what they are being given to see, Freudenburg locates new narrative content lurking in old places, brought to life within the imaginations of readers. The end result is a new approach to the question of how ancient epic tales convey narrative content through visual means. "This book concerns the rhetoric of visual manipulation that provokes readers to envision what is written on the page, treating visual details in ancient epic not as mere scene-setting information or enhancements to any given story, but as cues for performing specific imaginative processes. Through a series of close readings centred primarily on Virgil's Aeneid, the book aims to show that the experiential effects that Virgil puts into play do serious narrative work of their own by structuring lines of sight, both visual and emotive, and shifting them about in ways that move readers into and out of the visual and emotional worlds of the story's characters. Whereas most studies of narrative visualization concern seeing, this one concerns watching. And listening. And trying to keep up. Informing the book's theoretical approach are recent cognitivist and constructivist studies of how audiences watch narrative films and make sense of what they are being given to see. By looking to the world of narrative films, where directors use shots craftily edited to cue audiences to 'fill in' for what the camera itself cannot show, the book locates new narrative content lurking in old places, brought to life within the imaginations of readers. The end result is a new approach to the question of how ancient epic tales convey narrative content through visual means"-- Provided by publisher ## Abstract This book concerns the rhetoric of visual manipulation that provokes readers to envision what is written on the page, treating visual details in ancient epic not as mere scene-setting information or enhancements to any given story, but as cues for performing specific imaginative processes. Through a series of close readings centered primarily on Virgil’s Aeneid, the book aims to show that the experiential effects that Virgil puts into play do serious narrative work of their own by structuring lines of sight, both visual and emotive, and shifting them about in ways that move readers into and out of the visual and emotional worlds of the story’s characters. Whereas most studies of narrative visualization concern seeing, this one concerns watching. And listening. And trying to keep up. Informing the book’s theoretical approach are recent cognitivist and constructivist studies of how audiences watch narrative films and make sense of what they are being given to see. By looking to the world of narrative films, where directors use shots craftily edited to cue audiences to “fill in” for what the camera itself cannot show, the book locates new narrative content lurking in old places, brought to life within the imaginations of readers. The end result is a new approach to the question of how ancient epic tales convey narrative content through visual means. Cover Virgil’s Cinematic Art Copyright Dedication Contents Preface List of Illustrations Introduction: The “Seeming” of the “Seen”—​Narrative as Vision in Ancient Epic I.1. Seeing with Eyes Tightly Shut I.2. Two Worlds in Dialogue: Film Analysis and Classic Narratology 1. Introducing Suture 1.1. Tracking Turnus: Visual Pursuit 1.2. Watching Paris: Hatred at First Sight 1.3. Sightings, First and Last: the Insect Similes of the Aeneid 2. Precedents in Earlier Roman Poetry 2.1. Getting High with Lucretius 2.2. Vertical Relations 2.3. The Grammar of Angles Taken 2.4. The Other Side of High: Positioning Pathos 3. Seeing as Telling 3.1. The Temple Ecphrasis of Aeneid 1 3.2. Aeneas the Neoteric 3.3. Duces Feminae: Fade to Dido 3.4. Image Pairs: The Catullan Background 3.5. Caving In to Desire: Dido’s Wedding Parade 4. Imagery as Understory 4.1. Dido’s Visual Feast 4.2. Picturing Virgil’s Words: Dido in the Middle 4.3. Golden Dido 4.4. On Keeping Dido Unfathomable 4.5. Girl on Fire 5. Imagery as Counternarrative in the Death of Camilla 5.1. Imagining Camilla 5.2. Tracking Prey with Camilla 5.3. Dressed to Kill: Clothing as Fire-​starter, Again 5.4. The Death of Camilla as a Life Fully Lived 5.5. One Last Look: Visual Counternarrative, and the Humanness of Virgil’s “Heroes” Appendix Works Cited Index