Description
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and stars-or something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovid's work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans' place in it.
Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid's masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres-letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others-some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder's metamorphoses invert protagonists' relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today.
Providing fresh perspective on Ovid's classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.
About the Author
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain, and senior fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Germany. His previous Columbia University Press books include Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts (2019), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (2023).
Reviews
Michael Marder's Metamorphoses Reimagined is a literary triumph, a transmutation more than a translation, and should be widely read. Marder's retelling of Ovid is radical in intent and kaleidoscopic in its choice of devices. It brings the time and detail of epic together with the time and detail of the contemporary in innovative, experimental ways. There is something especially cinematic to this poet-philosopher's vivid re-narrating of the Latin original into a montage of performance and staging directions, utterance and annotation. As he deconstructs and recomposes Metamorphoses through a constellation of genres, Marder reclaims the baroque for us, in its defiantly transgressive and unpredictable excess-as a technique of being and redrafting our relationship to the world, of recrafting stories and songs as we come to grips with our turbulent Now. -- Ranjit Hoskote, author of To Break and to Branch
Marder's book is more than a rewriting or rereading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a writing-reading-listening-seeing at the same time, metamorphoses metamorphosing in words-images-sounds. It reveals what common hermeneutics forgets: namely, the courage to see-listen-think-write-recall-imagine in one gesture, without any attempt to unite or synthesize differences. -- Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback, coauthor of Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking, Writing
Marder has metamorphized The Metamorphoses. In a bold intervention, he worked into the process that weaves and unravels Ovid's text out of sounds, plants, flesh, bones, and spirits one more precious stone: this very book. -- Marcus Coelen, psychoanalyst, University of Munich
Book Information
ISBN 9780231212540
Author Michael Marder
Format Hardback
Page Count 344
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid's masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres-letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others-some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder's metamorphoses invert protagonists' relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today.
Providing fresh perspective on Ovid's classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.
About the Author
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain, and senior fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Germany. His previous Columbia University Press books include Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts (2019), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (2023).
Reviews
Michael Marder's Metamorphoses Reimagined is a literary triumph, a transmutation more than a translation, and should be widely read. Marder's retelling of Ovid is radical in intent and kaleidoscopic in its choice of devices. It brings the time and detail of epic together with the time and detail of the contemporary in innovative, experimental ways. There is something especially cinematic to this poet-philosopher's vivid re-narrating of the Latin original into a montage of performance and staging directions, utterance and annotation. As he deconstructs and recomposes Metamorphoses through a constellation of genres, Marder reclaims the baroque for us, in its defiantly transgressive and unpredictable excess-as a technique of being and redrafting our relationship to the world, of recrafting stories and songs as we come to grips with our turbulent Now. -- Ranjit Hoskote, author of To Break and to Branch
Marder's book is more than a rewriting or rereading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a writing-reading-listening-seeing at the same time, metamorphoses metamorphosing in words-images-sounds. It reveals what common hermeneutics forgets: namely, the courage to see-listen-think-write-recall-imagine in one gesture, without any attempt to unite or synthesize differences. -- Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback, coauthor of Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking, Writing
Marder has metamorphized The Metamorphoses. In a bold intervention, he worked into the process that weaves and unravels Ovid's text out of sounds, plants, flesh, bones, and spirits one more precious stone: this very book. -- Marcus Coelen, psychoanalyst, University of Munich
Book Information
ISBN 9780231212540
Author Michael Marder
Format Hardback
Page Count 344
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
