Cross-genre in Heroides

• Grant number: 15/11829-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: November 02, 2015
• End date: January 23, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Alexandre Pinheiro Hasegawa
• Grantee: Cecilia Marcela Ugartemendía
• Supervisor: Gianpiero Rosati
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), Italy
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/05067-9 - The exemplarity of abandonment: elegiac epistle and intratextuality in Heroides, BP.MS

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyze the Heroides´ genre. What opens the discussion is the genre-mixture in the poems, that allows to understand them not as elegies inserted in an epistolary fiction, nor as epistles with elegiac traits, but as belonging to a third genre, a cross-genre resulting from the juxtaposition of both. The poems of this ignotum opus (Ars am. 3. 346) seem to be, therefore, so much elegiac as epistolary, without belonging more to a genre than to the other. Having already initiated our study on the elegiac characteristics of the poems, we will focus our research mostly in the epistolary form, its limits and the features of this genre. With this purpose, we seek thereby to justify why Ovid chose to have these women to write letters specifically and what are the gains of mixing these two genres. In addition, we would like to prove the possibility that this cross-genre epistle and elegy has a didactic feature, that enables the reader to understand some women as paradigmatic for the others and to understand the poems as a group of (counter)exempla to be read (intratextualy within the own work of Ovid) with the Ars amatoria. (AU)