#future reflexive (barchiesi)

[splendidemendax]

time to actually take notes on alessandro barchiesi's "future reflexive" bc it lives in my head 24/7 but i get horribly distracted every time i try to find a quote in it and simply cannot be trusted to refer to the text directly

[splendidemendax]

The formal irruption of tragedy into the elegiac texture directs us to the Sophoclean model — only to discover that the Deianira of the "Women of Trachis' utters no lament, either for Hercules or for herself. With an exceptional dramatic solution, she vanishes wordlessly (Trach. 813) from the scene and immediately kills herself on the marriage bed. Ovid has his Deianira speaking in this blank of the Sophoclean model. The Ovidian refrain "What is keeping you from dying, Deianira" sounds like an implicit self-reproach - not only because she is crushed by shame and guilt, but because by her delay she is swerving from the path laid down by the official model for this letter, the Trachiniae. Once again we see, and I shall come back to this later, how intertextual irony could be linked to a kind of self-referentiality. The text sees its future reflected in the mirror of its model, and at the same time sends its reader backwards to that model. —barchiesi, "future reflexive", 342

[splendidemendax]

my excellent and brilliant friend tell (author of the two epistolary fics i betaed/recced in the last few months) wrote an excellent and brilliant meta about the ending of the tv show merlin.

ngl, i barely even go here ("here" being not just merlin but also shakespearean tragedy and old english poetry, which feature heavily) and i still loved it. you should read it.

[splendidemendax]

managed to quote my all time fav academic article (alessandro barchiesi's "future reflexive: two modes of allusion and ovid's heroides" my beloved) in an essay that i'm writing for ao3. this feels like some kind of victory.

[splendidemendax]

there's something extremely sensible abt enterprise having a guy from the future constantly coming back and trying to shape the mission. it reminds me of a bit from barchiesi's "future reflexive" about allusions to earlier texts which descibe events in the characters' future:

...the effect approaches what we usually call dramatic irony: the information that the author shares with the audience tends to create a sort of complicity between them directed against the characters.

daniels' role in the narrative is to embody that complicity. he knows what we know: that the federation has to happen and archer's going to be involved. he wants what we want: to see that happen, so we can get to the bright shiny future that trek promises

it's a really interesting way to deal with the tension that my mom calls "the prequel problem", where that complicity lurks unspoken underneath the surface of the text