JULIA
H. GAISSER
Research
Interests:
Republican and Augustan poetry, Renaissance humanism, Reception.
Courses:
Alexandrian Tradition in Roman Poetry, Vergil, Roman Elegy, Reception.
Recent Publications:
Catullus in English. Penguin Books, 2001.
Pierio Valeriano on the Ill-fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance
Humanist and his World. University of Michigan Press, 1999.
“Allegorizing Apuleius: Fulgentius, Boccaccio, Beroaldo, and
the Chain of Receptions.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini
Cantabrigiensis (Tempe, Arizona, 2003) 23-41.
“The Reception of Classical Texts in the Renaissance.” In
The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century. (I Tatti
Studies, 2002) 387-400.
“Picturing Catullus.” Classical World 95 (2002) 372-85.
“Teaching Classics in the Renaissance,” Transactions
of the American Philological Association. 131 (2001) 1-21.
“Threads in the Labyrinth: Competing Views and Voices in Catullus
64,” American Journal of Philology 116 (1995) 579-616.
Personal Statement:
My overriding interest is in the use and reuse of classical authors
from antiquity to the present. I study allusion, intertextuality,
imitation, interpretation, transmission, and appropriation –
in a word, reception. Although my research is diverse in method and
focus, it all comes down to studying the interplay of authors, texts,
and historical circumstances over time. I am fascinated by the ways
in which an ancient poet like Catullus or Vergil (or a Renaissance
poet like Pontano or Iohannes Secundus) uses allusion to bring earlier
texts into his work to create a new and complex play of meaning. Working
with intertextuality on this level requires close reading – very
close reading – of both the later poet and his models; since
I was trained by new critics, it is one of my favorite activities.
But it also requires thinking about the different cultural settings
of the later poem and its intertexts – a much more modern consideration.
I also like working on a broader scale, studying the transmission
of ancient authors over time. In my first book, Catullus and his Renaissance
Readers (1993), I studied several genres of Renaissance reception
– text criticism, university lecturing, commentaries, and literary
imitation and parody. My present research is even more broad-ranging:
a book on the reception of Apuleius from antiquity to about 1500.
This study involves textual transmission and manuscripts, pagans and
Christians in Rome at the end of the fourth century, manuscript illuminations
and Florentine wedding chests, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the origins
of printing, and the Plato-Aristotle controversy of the fifteenth
century. It is both literary and historical, for I am thoroughly convinced
that in reception studies one must know (and care) as much about the
receivers as about the received.
I teach graduate courses on Republican and Augustan poetry: Vergil’s
Aeneid, Roman Elegy, and the Alexandrian Tradition in Roman Poetry.
We read as much Latin and as many secondary sources as we can; the
emphasis is on discussion; and I always have an eye on close reading,
intertextuality, and literary (and cultural) history. Next year I
will be team-teaching a new interdisciplinary course on Reception
with David Cast in Art History. He will focus on monuments and I on
texts, and we’ll have visitors with special expertise on reception
theory and particular topics.
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