I’ve been contemplating a number of ideas for my term paper and I believe I’ve finally narrowed it down. I was so impressed by Malouf’s rendering of Ovid’s exile in An Imaginary Life that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about it.
Although I am still trying to focus my paper, and thoughts, I grabbed a couple books on Malouf at the trusty library and started page flipping. Here’s a quote I found in the Contemporary World Writers edition of David Malouf, by Don Randall, “The decision to write an imaginary life for Ovid is based on a primary recognition that history is synecdochic, that our sense of the past is necessarily partial and gapped” (42). It brings back memories of 300 and our ongoing debate over the definition of synecdoche and metonymy. Kayla remembers. Good ‘old synecdoche, a part stands for the whole. A part of history stands for the whole; the past possesses the present.
Where will this term paper take me? We’ll see. I imagine it’ll turn out somewhat essay-ish, maybe if I’m lucky, even poetic; but I will certainly enjoy writing it. My tentative tile is ‘Malouf; Historical, Imaginary, Autobiographical, or D - all of the above?’ No thesis statement yet, but I’ll post one when it comes to life.
As for that test, well, it was harder than the first one, that’s for sure, at least for me. I mixed up my Ovid stories so bad, especially after trying to keep all the Homo sapiens, ergasters, and erectus’ straight for my anthropology test the class before. Yeah, yeah, excuses, excuses; it was just a test; ‘My soul would sing of metamorphosis,’ to transform into a raccoon; ‘I shall have life, I shall live.’ -Good stuff, good times.
