SELECT OVID

The teaching of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a popular text for intermediate and advanced-level undergraduates, of necessary involves selected myths. But as a result the students are not given a sense of the poem's complex thematic interrelationships or of its sophisticated chronological sweep; selections also often overlook the importance of the female voice in Ovid's epic. Read in isolation, moreover, the stories generally invite a moralizing approach that overlooks the nuances gleaned from their broader contexts. Reading the Metamorphoses simultaneously in translation would widen the scope of the students' understanding of this poem sophisticated narrative and thematic texture.