Making Mockery

Rosen offers a fascinating study of the evolution of the genre through a sequence of representations, literary, and material. This book will spark new approaches in scholars working right across the comic spectrum. --Cedric Littlewood American Journal of Philology This is an unusual book in several ways. It deals with both Greek and Roman literature. It integrates iconography into a text-centered discussion. It shows knowledge of a correspondingly vast secondary theory out of its analyses of a wide variety of poems and passages, and thus shows how theory is possible within a philological and historically organized discourse. --Bryn Mawr Classical Review Rosen makes a fascinating case for a 'poetics of mockery' that avoids moralistic simplicities and probes the complex strategies adopted by ancient satirists to engage their audiences. By subtly unpicking the performative conventions, tropes, and narrative ruses through which ridicule is transmuted into poetry, this book raises the discussion of ancient satire and its cultural dynamics to a new level of critical sophistication. --Stephen Halliwell, University of St. Andrews In this highly innovative, rich and impressively broad-ranging study, Rosen offers the first genuinely synoptic examination of the phenomenon of poetic satire in Greco-Roman antiquity.... Scholars working in any number of disciplines, from myth to genre studies, art history to literary theory, will find this a stimulating and lucid work and one that fills a too long outstanding gap in our understanding of the ancient poetic tradition. --Deborah Steiner, Columbia University This is an exceptionally rich study of mockery as a telling, and always problematic, social practice in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Besides tackling the diachronic development of various genres of mockery practiced from Homer to Juvenal, this study details the theorizing of those genres by those who practiced them, and by the many critics, both ancient and modern, who have struggled to come to terms with those practices and, above all, to take them seriously. But the illicit pleasures of mockery are never under-represented by this book, for Rosen is especially good at cracking open the many synchronic puzzles that the ancient materials pose, to expose satire's dirty secrets in ways that bring to life the particular characters and events and the larger culture wars that are the matrix of satiric invention. --Kirk Freudenburg, Yale University This is an unusual book in several ways. It deals with both Greek and Roman literature. It integrates iconography into a text-centered discussion. It shows knowledge of a correspondingly vast secondary theory out of its analyses of a wide variety of poems and passages, and thus shows how theory is possible within a philological and historically organized discourse. --Bryn Mawr Classical Review Rosen makes a fascinating case for a 'poetics of mockery' that avoids moralistic simplicities and probes the complex strategies adopted by ancient satirists to engage their audiences. By subtly unpicking the performative conventions, tropes, and narrative ruses through which ridicule is transmuted into poetry, this book raises the discussion of ancient satire and its cultural dynamics to a new level of critical sophistication. --Stephen Halliwell, University of St. Andrews In this highly innovative, rich and impressively broad-ranging study, Rosen offers the first genuinely synoptic examination of the phenomenon of poetic satire in Greco-Roman antiquity. Moving from the archaic through to the imperial period, the author scrutinizes the complex literary dynamic operative in ancient poetic mockery, persuasively arguing that the personal attacks and abusive polemics that fill this most apparently transgressive and spur-of-the-moment of literary forms obey a consistent set of principles, protocols and tropes as stylized as those that, in the author's own analogy, govern gangsta rap today. The work is filled with striking insights and arguments, and Rosen supplies new readings of texts that range from those at the center of the canon (the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the dramas of Aristophanes) to those at its margins (the myth of Heracles and the Cercopes). --Deborah Steiner, Columbia University This is an exceptionally rich study of mockery as a telling, and always problematic, social practice in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Besides tackling the diachronic development of various genres of mockery practiced from Homer to Juvenal, this study details the theorizing of those genres by those who practiced them, and by the many critics, both ancient and modern, who have struggled to come to terms with those practices and, above all, to take them seriously. But the illicit pleasures of mockery are never under-represented by this book, for Rosen is especially good at cracking open the many synchronic puzzles that the ancient materials pose, to expose satire's dirty secrets in ways that bring to life the particular characters and events and the larger culture wars that are the matrix of satiric invention. --Kirk Freudenburg, Yale University