Agora Speaker Series - Arachne or the Metamorphosis of Labor

Abstract:

Arachne, one of the most widely discussed figures in Ovid's metamorphic universe, has often been seen as one of many Doppelgänger of the poet. Particular attention has been devoted to the contest between the highly talented Maeonian girl and Minerva: their respective tapestries have been read as manifestos of different poetics. This talk focuses on Arachne herself as a worker, proposing two interrelated points. Firstly, she is punished by the goddess in a particularly ingenious way because her work as a weaver is now deprived of the significance of art and reduced to pure labor, which is the bodily necessity of a spider but bearing no meaning. Secondly, Arachne, although she fully masters her art, audaciously but consistently refuses to identify with the profession of a weaver. Minerva's punishment re-establishes the balance: as a spider, Arachne is compelled to weave by a natural necessity, reducing her will to an endless but meaningless activity that leaves no room for her intellectual aspirations: her imaginative work ends up being only pure labor.

Bio:

Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin literature at Ghent University. He has published on late antique literature, early Christian martyr acts, ancient technical and scientific texts, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its reception. Editor of the series “sera tela. Studies in Late Antique Literature and its Reception” (Bloomsbury, London) and of “The Library of the Other Antiquity” (Winter, Heidelberg). Currently he is the principal investigator of the research project “Coming After. Late Antique Ecopoetics”, funded by FWO (Research Foundation, Flanders), and the creator of “Titubanti Testi. Binomio di lettura”.