Department of Classical StudiesOn Zoom, please register below
Speaker: Melissa Mueller, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Title: In the Bardo with Tithonos: Reading Sappho with Homer and Eve Sedgwick
Abstract: This talk explores the queer asynchronies of Sappho’s Tithonos Poem. I draw on Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “bardo”—suspension between death and rebirth—to articulate the in-between position of Tithonos as he transitions from a human into an insect body. And I suggest that Dawn’s embrace of her soon-to-be-non-human lover resonates, on many levels, with Sedgwick’s own experience of living with a terminal illness, on the threshold between life and death. The problem of asynchrony—of two beings who are trapped in fundamentally distinct temporalities—informs the singer’s lament (particularly the verb στεναχίσδω) and shapes our awareness of the unvoiced, unarticulated transformation which awaits Tithonos.
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