LOOKING (AT) ARIADNE. VISION AND MEANING IN CATULLUS, OVID AND HOFMANNSTHAL

Vortrag: VIOLETA GERJIKOVA

The myth of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, after having helped him to defeat the Minotaur, has been inspiring hundreds of authors and artists through the centuries. An archetypal account is presented in a short epic poem by the Roman poet Catullus, which can be interpreted as a drama of looking, seeing and not seeing. The thematic scope is further traced in Ovid’s variation in the “Letter of Ariadne to Theseus” and in the most original approach in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for the opera “Ariadne on Naxos” by Richard Strauss. The complex problems of human contact, desire, longing, collapse and loss are discussed through the theme of visual perception. Vision in the text represents the interpersonal communication, and the characters that do not happen to be depicted as looking at the others are at the same time implicitly displayed as insensitive, indifferent to the Other and self-sufficient, or as closed to the world. The rejection or failure to enter into visual contact is suggestive about the author’s ways of creating meaning, as looking and seeing not only provides us with information about our situation and our relationship to the others, but also constitutes our interaction with the situation and establishes the relationship itself.

Violeta Gerjikova is Associate Professor at the University of Sofia. She studied Classical Philology at the University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridsky”. In 1991 she became Assistant Professor for Ancient Civilization at the Department of Classics, at the Sofia University, 1998 Ph. D. thesis “Concepts and Ideas of Culture in Ancient Greek Prose of V–IV centuries BC”.
Publications (among others): Education in the old Greek classical period as a cultural issue, in: New Publicity 5, Sofia 2001; Ancient Literature in Bulgaria from the Liberation from Ottoman Suppression till the End of World War I, in: Translation Reception of Ancient Literature in Bulgaria during 19th and 20th centuries, vol. 3, Sofia 2002, 17–36; “Uncosy” Classics, in: Critique and Humanism, vol. 13, No. 1/2002, 7–33; Epic and Gastronomy. Aspects of Representation of Food and Feasting in Homer, in: Historical Bulletin 1, Blagoevgrad 2003; Thucydides’ Concepts and Ideas of Culture, in: Annual of Sofia University, FCMP, vol. 90, 1-2, 2003, 5–54; Ancient Greek Views on Civilization and World Order: The Speeches of Isocrates, in: Papers of the International Symposium Civilizations and World Orders, Istanbul 2006 (in press); Visens oculis: Sight and Visual Experience in Catullus, Sofia (forthcoming).