Dennis Olsson

The Swedish Institute in Rome Annual Fellowship, Philology

As part of my thesis “Chiasmus in Roman literature”, I intend to investigate the conceptualization of chiastic-narratological structures during the early imperial period, especially based on Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses. Chiasmus usually refers to a figure of speech where a sentence is syntactically mirrored around a clear center (cf. Shakespeare’s famous “fair is foul and foul is fair”), but this mirror structure can also be found on a narratological level in a wide variety of texts. Chiasmus is essentially an inverted parallelism. Since the structure is mirrored, it also tends to be self-reflexive and has lent itself well to various metatextual games. Chiasmus has a unique analytical potential that has not yet been sufficiently explored with regard to Roman literature.

My project focuses to a great extent on the chiastic turning point in the narrative middle. It is a particularly significant locus in the text, often with form-related metatextual allusions. For Ovid, the symbol-laden cave is at the very center. My work at the institute will consist of mapping and understanding the symbolic-aesthetic function of the cave in ancient literature, as well as its relationship to chiasmus. By combining a philological close reading method and French poststructuralist theory, I hope to gain new insights into to the use of chiasmus.