Giuseppe Pezzini | The Veil of the Name: Comedy in the Aeneid

Please join us on Monday, October 28 at 4pm for Professor Giuseppe Pezzini (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford) who will be speaking on “The Veil of the Name: Comedy in the Aeneid,” in Dodd 248.

All are welcome!

Description:

The lecture will explore an important yet neglected ingredient of Virgil’s recipe in the Aeneid, namely Roman comedy, preserved primarily through the works of Plautus and Terence. Readers of Roman comedy cannot help but recognize in Aeneid4 a web of comic motifs and situations that enrich its plot and characters, stirring and manipulating readers’ (and characters’) expectations. Some of these motifs are not exclusively comic and appear in other genres and texts, notably tragedy (as long recognized by Virgil scholars), yet their comic origin and implications should not be underestimated. After a brief but systematic overview of comic elements in Aeneid 4, I will focus on ‘liminal’ tragic-comic features, arguing that this process of genre hybridization evokes comic expectations only to ultimately subvert them.