Emma Scioli: Fantasies and Dreams: Imago and Vestigium in Ovid’s Heroides

Join the Classics Society in welcoming Emma J. Scioli, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the Center for Global and International Studies at The University of Kansas.

Abstract
In this talk, Scioli will present a new framework for reading Ovid’s Heroides, his fictional letters written by women (mostly) from Greek and Roman mythology to the lovers who have abandoned them. In particular, Scioli will look at references in select letters to the absent bodies of the missing lovers, dividing the inquiry into two sections: references to the traces left by the absent body (the vestigium), and references to the of the absent body recalled in a memory or seen a dream, and, in one stark and evocative example, fashioned as a sculpture in the medium of wax (the imago). Scioli will speak about the ways in which the writers imagine engaging with the absent body and its imprint through touch, and how this engagement reflects the act of letter writing itself.