Browsing by Author "Bryant, Jermaine Rafael Garson"

This dissertation "Roman Post-Triumviral Elegy and the Rhetoric of Trauma" argues thatduring the post-civil war period of the first century BC, Latin authors devised new modes of expression to capture the lasting effects of negative experience. These modes drew their force from cultural shifts that occurred in the wake of mass loss of life and political disruption. The dissertation straddles the presentation of trauma as a social force capable of creating new literary categories and social identities, and trauma as a subjective individual experience, characterized by specific aesthetics. To tackle the many sides of these social, literary, and aesthetic developments, each chapter evaluates either a specific literary innovation of the \of Propertius and Tibullus, or a dominant thematic concern of an elegiac author by employing trauma theory informed analysis. The first chapter draws on Lucretius’ philosophical discourses of lovesickness prior and contemporary to the first century and identifies elegy as a site to which the Romans displaced developing discourses of emotional wounding. Chapter 2 discusses how trauma is communicated through divergent on perspectives on time, and how elegy’s narrator, unable to form a picture of Rome no-longer plagued by civic violence, develops a nonnormative relationship with temporality, one that other authors are keyed-into and comment upon. Chapter 3 takes aim at the way that trauma, itself not a moral force, invokes a rhetoric of morality to silence other narratives that might be problematic for the version of events the speaker presents to gain sympathy. As a case study of this phenomenon, this chapter reads Tibullus 1.1 and 2.3 against one another: the socially elite narrator, dispossessed after the civil wars, positions his dispossession against the recent fortune of his rival, a formerly enslaved man recently granted land in the redistribution. Chapter 4 looks at Propertius 1.21 and 1.22: the only surviving post-Triumviral recollections of the massacre after the Siege of Perusia that are written by someone who claims to have been affected by the event. With these poems as a foundation, I examine the representation oftensions between central Italic and Roman identities in the wake of the siege.