From rthomas@fas.harvard.edu Sun Mar 25 11:24:43 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id LAA85700 for ; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 11:24:42 -0800 Received: from smtp4.fas.harvard.edu (IDENT:root@smtp4.fas.harvard.edu [140.247.30.84]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f2PJOg720973 for ; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 11:24:42 -0800 Received: from is07.fas.harvard.edu (IDENT:rthomas@is07.fas.harvard.edu [140.247.30.107]) by smtp4.fas.harvard.edu with ESMTP id OAA15817; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 14:24:41 -0500 (EST) Received: by is07.fas.harvard.edu with ESMTP id OAA10290; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 14:24:41 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 14:24:41 -0500 (EST) From: Richard Thomas To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: Dryden and Richard Thomas In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, David Lupher wrote: Well, I think we agree on much here, particularly if we separate Virgil from Dryden. But one detail, and we're now just on Virgil.: > I would say that Austin found the "ritual correctness" of this passage > "expected" because perversion of ritual is a very powerful---and hence > eternally recurrent---literary device. (There's a virtual scholarly > industry devoted to discussing such ritual perversion in Greek tragedy, > for example.) This particular perversion is, as Austin says, particularly > "uncanny"---that is, it is weirdly vivid and memorable---just ask Berlioz. "Perversion of ritual" seems to be a new element (certainly not in Austin), one that is often invoked it seems to me to explain why bad things happen. But who perverted ritual here? Dido and Aeneas? Juno? > > 2) If, as you seem to be suggesting, the poet has gone out of his > way to give this wedding a kind of cosmic legitimacy, why would he > suggest that she *now* has a "culpa" to paper over with the "nomen" > of "coniugium"? In both her eyes and those of the poet (according > to your reading of the scene), the "sexual act" will now take place > in a fully sanctioned union. I would say because she can call her (authorially focalized) "culpa" (illicit sexual act as in 4.19, where the speaker is irrelevant to the semantics; cf. OLD sv culpa 3b) a "coniugium" aftyer undergoing what she and/or the author have thought of/called "conubia". Again, it's not but she thinks it is. .