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The detection of Romantic Irony in Classical literature is not of course a novelty.20 One of the most interesting and ambitious uses of the concept was by Douglass Parker in his 1969 Arion article on 'The Ovidian Coda'. He finds seven of Ovid's Amores 1.7, 1.10, 1.13, 1.14, 2.13, 2.14, and 2.15 'distinguished by a common structural peculiarity'.21 |
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He expounds this closural device in terms of Romantic Irony, and uses it to support a serious reading of the Amores in the manner of Hermann Fränkel:22 |
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the poems of the Amores, by their wit rather than in spite of it, make quite serious points, points whose complexity are advanced rather than retarded by a specious simplicity and a surface slickness. |
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This is a first-rate account of how these endings would work if the codas represented true Romantic Irony. Parker's reading of 1.7, for instance, the poem in which Ovid agonizes over his violence to Corinna and then concludes by inviting her to wreak vengeance on his body or at least tidy her hair, is of serious moral agony only at the conclusion subverted. Only the coda reveals the previous language and response to be overblown:23 |
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were the last distich lacking, the poem, even with the time-shift, would be quite different; its language would be, for the whole of the piece, admissible as somehow 'true'. |
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The trouble is, I cannot see it like that. For me, the poem is humorous from the beginning and the final throwaway only confirms our cynical |
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20 Some references in Fowler (1989) 109 n. 126: add especially Schmitt (1989). |
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21 Parker (1969) 93. |
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22 Parker (1969) 81. |
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23 Parker (1969) 87. |
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