Papers by Genevieve Liveley
Fables for Tomorrow
Routledge eBooks, May 26, 2022
Springer eBooks, 2017
In one of the first analyses of its kind, this chapter examines how the tools and heuristics of n... more In one of the first analyses of its kind, this chapter examines how the tools and heuristics of narratology (the study of narrative) might enhance the study of anticipation. It assesses whether narratological insights into the ways in which stories narrate and readers read might enable us to tell better stories about the future and at the same time to become better readers of the possible worlds that such stories anticipate. Investigating the theory and praxis of anticipation across a broad temporal range of possible (fictional) and actual (real) world models and narratives (from antiquity to postmodernity), it scopes some of the pitfalls and possibilities opened up by treating the future as 'storied'. It engages with the latest studies on cognitive narratology, possible worlds theories, and so-called 'future narratives', examining anticipatory narratives particularly relating to the environment and to the self. It argues that the stories we tell about the future, including our future selves, must be open, multi-linear, and multi-dimensional in order to avoid anticipatory backshadowing, which forecasts the future as a continuation of the past and present. Narrative shapes our knowledge and understanding of the world-our past, present, and future. Narratology explains how narrative does this. Narratology has been characterized as a science, as a methodology, as a theory, and as a humanities discipline, combining both theory and praxis in the formal, rhetorical, and critical analysis of textual discourse across a broad spectrum of different genres and media (Meister 2014). Alongside its various theoretical schools (formalist, structuralist, post-structuralist, etc.) narratology has produced many sub-disciplines in recent years (cognitive, feminist, computational, etc.
Futures, 2021
This paper explores the particular role of narrative in developing futures literacy. As literacy ... more This paper explores the particular role of narrative in developing futures literacy. As literacy denotes the ability to express and absorb meaning through language, enabling individuals to parse information and relate to others, then futures literacy also needs to draw on the insights of narrative to embrace its full emancipatory potential. We set out the importance of narrative in (1) framing, (2) shaping, and (3) critiquing the world-building techniques that form the foundation of futures thinking and futures literacy. These insights into the "storiness" of futurity, we argue, enhance critical reflexivity and illuminate our wider understanding of the dynamics that drive assumptions about the future(s). This paper offers three examples of how working with narrative tools can enhance futures literacy. First, we show how narrative theory can help us understand the limitations of the human imagination when it comes to futures thinking. Second, we offer an overview of how collaborative, character-led storytelling can activate an agentic relationship with uncertain and complex futures. Finally, we explore how speculative fiction reveals the importance of context in futures thinking. Overall, we demonstrate how proficiency in narrative theory and literary studies can shed more light on the cultural and ontological perspectives and specificities to be considered in how we anticipate and engage in futures thinking.
A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, 2017
Surfing the Third Wave?: Postfeminism and the Hermeneutics of Reception
Classics and the Uses of Reception
... 13 Compare with Batstone's the future perfect in the present. 14 Abish (1977) 107 ... ... more ... 13 Compare with Batstone's the future perfect in the present. 14 Abish (1977) 107 ... the different directions that fem-inist criticism has already taken and might yet take, considering particularly the interdisciplinary companions that feminists have and might yet elect to travel with at ...
Science Fictions and Cyber Myths: or, Do Cyborgs Dream of Dolly the Sheep?
Laughing with Medusa, 2008
For most science writers and theorists, the history of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism... more For most science writers and theorists, the history of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism coined by the research scientist Manfred Clynes and the clinical psychiatrist Nathan Kline to refer to a technologically enhanced man or ‘cybernetic organism’ — a fusion of organism, machine, and code — capable of surviving and working in hostile alien environments. This chapter examines what constitutes feminist science by dissecting the work of Donna Haraway and the modern myth of the ‘cyborg’. It shows how the utopia of feminist science fiction is modelled upon ancient myths of hybridity, but at the same time seeks to distance itself from that ancient legacy. In her ground-breaking and now ‘classic’ analysis of feminism in the post-modern Western world, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Haraway proposes some provocative ways of rethinking human subjectivity, invoking the term ‘cyborg’ as a metaphor for the late 20th-century subject.
Cleopatra's Nose, Naso and the Science of Chaos
Greece and Rome, 2002
‘After his wine-dark sea’
Homer's Daughters
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary writers, repeatedly que... more Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary writers, repeatedly questions the (im)possibility of telling stories, of writing poetry, after Homer. Focusing upon a relatively neglected aspect of H.D.’s classicism, this chapter investigates the ways in which H.D.’s poetry engages directly, and sometimes playfully, with Homeric epic. After analysing a selection of her earlier works (‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’, ‘Calypso’, ‘At Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Odyssey’) for insights into H.D.’s witty, quasi-counterfactual classicism, it offers a close reading of the Homeric features of H.D.’s final poem, the 1961 epic Helen in Egypt. The analysis offered here argues that H.D.’s responses to Homer demonstrate a ‘releasing’ of pre-existing narrative emphases rather than a ‘resistant’ reading against the grain of the Homeric tradition, in a more sympathetic and less antagonistic engagement with the Homeric source texts than received readings tend to acknowledge.
Ancient narrative theory in practice
Narratology
This chapter views the critics of the ancient Greek scholia and later Latin commentaries as pract... more This chapter views the critics of the ancient Greek scholia and later Latin commentaries as practising proto-narratologists. It demonstrates that their work is clearly informed by the prevailing narratological theories of the day—the scholia by Plato and Peripatetic ‘Aristotelianism’ if not directly by the Poetics, and the Servius commentators by Horace too. They and their readers have recourse to a complex lexicon of specialized narratological terms and concepts (as knotty as anything dreamed up by the Russian formalists or French structuralists) often freely adapted from ancient theories of rhetoric. In this rhetorical-narratological context, they show a keen interest in matters of affect and cognition, in the ways that stories are formed so as to produce particular affects within and effects upon an audience, presenting a fascinating glimpse into ‘the business of narrating’ as understood by ancient theorists and critics.
Poststructuralism
Narratology
This chapter argues that the willingness of the poststructuralist narratologists (particularly Ch... more This chapter argues that the willingness of the poststructuralist narratologists (particularly Chatman, Lanser, Brooks, and de Lauretis) to look beyond the confines of twentieth-century linguistics and semiotics for their critical concepts and models re-energizes narratology’s relationship with ancient poetics. At the same time, the poststructuralist drive to push beyond the established boundaries of narratology and into a much wider domain of narrative ‘texts’—looking outside the narrow field of literary narrative into media such as film, music, and visual culture—rediscovers Aristotle’s Poetics and the anticipation of cross-medial narrative theory found there.
White Noise
Classics and Media Theory
In the first study of its kind to engage media theory in addressing a particularly contentious is... more In the first study of its kind to engage media theory in addressing a particularly contentious issue—that of the supposed connections between ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman elegy—this chapter investigates what is at stake in thinking about the dynamics of such a tradition, not in the familiar context of reception theory but in the context of media theory, where considerations of transmission and reception require us to consider the apparatuses of communication systems, the materials through which they achieve their discursive operations, and the noise that accompanies their broadcast. Taking Anne Carson’s Nox as a preliminary test case and then applying some of the principles of Ernst’s media archaeology to the medium of classical elegy, it argues for a new evaluation of elegy’s concerns with its own materiality and mediality, and thus its identity as an ongoing tradition.
Ancient narrative theory before Aristotle—Plato
Narratology
This chapter argues that we should be wary of assigning any theory of narrative voiced in the dra... more This chapter argues that we should be wary of assigning any theory of narrative voiced in the dramatic dialogue that is the Republic directly to Plato himself. We will not find a ‘Platonic’ theory of narrative either in Plato’s Ion or the Republic, and will not find an uncomplicated ‘Platonic’ relationship between diegesis and mimesis, or narrative showing and telling, there either. It suggests that, taken as an embryonic phase in the history of narrative theory, Plato’s ‘Socratic dialogues’ offer something of a false start—an evolutionary prequel rather than an introduction proper to narratology’s story.
Russian formalism
Narratology
This chapter examines the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics by the Russian formalists (with case s... more This chapter examines the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics by the Russian formalists (with case studies focusing on Shklovsky, Petrovsky, Tomashevsky, and Propp). It demonstrates that these Russian ‘neo-Aristotelians’ adopt and adapt their key narratological priorities and principles from the Poetics, especially their theories concerning fabula and syuzhet, the primacy of plot, of form synthesizing raw story content, and the importance of the experience and affect of narrative as it is cognitively processed by an audience. Aristotle’s Poetics is made strange in each new iteration of its reading and reception by the Russian ‘neo-Aristotelians’, with each (r)evolution itself configuring a self-conscious reaction of some kind to a contemporary theorist, no less than to Aristotle himself.
Ovid's Metamorphoses : Changing Worlds
A Companion to World Literature, 2019
Law and Humanities, 2020
This article seeks to break new ground by adopting an innovative methodology – a legal-narratolog... more This article seeks to break new ground by adopting an innovative methodology – a legal-narratological approach – in order to take a fresh look at the narrative dynamics and narrative tiers of a two-thousand-year-old piece of marriage legislation – the late first century BCE leges Iuliae. We argue that these Roman laws, which brought hitherto private behaviours into the public jurisdiction and state control, sought to establish its legal authority as a new normative framework through the lawmaker’s overt manipulation of the law qua narrative. In particular, we submit that it is through the explicit representation of the marriage legislation as a new chapter in an ancient cultural narrative that Augustus attempts to persuade the Roman senate and people of the constitutional validity of his radical legal reforms. We further propose that the ultimate failure of Augustus’ marriage legislation can also be understood in terms of a failure to align this new statute with the ‘master plot’ of...
Mater Amoris: Mothers and Lovers in Augustan Rome
Teaching in Higher Education, 2020
This paper examines one of the key temporal characteristics evident in public policy frames for w... more This paper examines one of the key temporal characteristics evident in public policy frames for widening participation in higher education. It demonstrates that the ambitions of such policies are potentially compromised by temporal notions implicated in a mode of chronocentrism, forecasting the future as a 'minimal departure' from the present. Engaging with the latest research into Futures Literacy and Anticipation it outlines alternative strategies for recognising and renegotiating such constraints ('What If?' scenarios and gaming), opening up pathways for policymakers and practitioners to imagine the future of higher education as a more inclusive and equitable time-space.
Prestructuralism
Narratology, 2019
This chapter demonstrates that prestructuralist ideas about the form and function of key narratol... more This chapter demonstrates that prestructuralist ideas about the form and function of key narratological phenomena such as plot, action, and character, mimesis and diegesis, showing and telling, not only make a significant contribution to the early twentieth-century (re)naissance of narrative theory in Europe and the US but also play a decisive role in the modern reception of ancient narrative theory. It argues that although James and Lubbock evince only broad Aristotelian affinities, their precepts help to establish an environment in which Aristotelian and Platonic (Socratic) theories find a ready and receptive audience. In similar ways, Forster, Friedman, and Stanzel open up a channel of communication between the ancient and modern worlds of narratology. What is more, their allusions to and appropriations of the classics help to shed new light on to some of the more controversial and complex aspects of both the Republic and Poetics.
Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of Story
(print) x, 285 p. : ill. ; 24 cmNarrating in couplets / Genevieve Liveley and Patricia Salzman-Mi... more (print) x, 285 p. : ill. ; 24 cmNarrating in couplets / Genevieve Liveley and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell -- Elegy and the erotics of narratology / Duncan Kennedy -- Snapshots of a love affair : Amores 1.5 and the program of elegiac narrative / Patricia Salzman-Mitchell -- Chronological segmentation in Ovid's Tristia : the implicit narrative of elegy / Eleonora Tola -- Women's time in the Remedia amoris / Hunter H. Gardner -- Paraquel lines : time and narrative in Ovid's Heroides / Genevieve Liveley -- Self-reflections on elegy writing, in two parts : the metapoetics of diptych elegies in Ovid, Amores 1.11 + 12 / Sophia Papaioannou -- Narration in a standstill : Propertius 1.16-18 / Christine Walde -- Platonic strategies in Ovid's tales of love / Vered Lev Kenaan -- Cornelia's exemplum : form and ideology in Propertius 4.11 / Michèle Lowrie -- The expert, the novice, and the exile : a narrative tale of three Ovids in Fasti / Steven Green -- The potentials of narrative : the rhetoric of the subjective in Tibullus / Benjamin Todd Lee -- Narrating Disiecta corpora : the rhetoric of bodily dismemberment in Prudentius's Peristephanon 11 / Christian A. Kaesser -- Telling Sulpicia's joys : narrativity at the receiving end / Mathilde SkoieItem embargoed for five year
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Papers by Genevieve Liveley