In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien utilizes metafiction to explore the idea of truth in war stories. O’Brien created two types of truth that are used for storytelling: the happening-truth and the story-truth. The happening truth refers to what actually happened in a story and the story-truth is a dramatized version of what actually happened in the story. Storytellers often utilize story-truth to convey the experience, rather than the just the events, to the audience. O’Brien hints to an interesting relationship and positive feedback loop between the audience and the storyteller which could ultimately cause the storyteller to utilize story-truth rather than the happening-truth. Using this lens, the war stories contained within The Odyssey and The Aeneid were analyzed to see how well the idea of story-truth vs. happening-truth as well as the relationship between the audience and storyteller were present. This analysis makes it apparent that all three of these war stories (Aeneas’, Odysseus’, and O’Brien’s) share much more in common than originally thought.
In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien utilizes metafiction to explore the idea of truth in war stories. O’Brien created two types of truth that are used for storytelling: the happening-truth and the story-truth. The happening truth refers to what actually happened in a story and the story-truth is a dramatized version of what actually happened in the story. Storytellers often utilize story-truth to convey the experience, rather than the just the events, to the audience. O’Brien hints to an interesting relationship and positive feedback loop between the audience and the storyteller which could ultimately cause the storyteller to utilize story-truth rather than the happening-truth. Using this lens, the war stories contained within The Odyssey and The Aeneid were analyzed to see how well the idea of story-truth vs. happening-truth as well as the relationship between the audience and storyteller were present. This analysis makes it apparent that all three of these war stories (Aeneas’, Odysseus’, and O’Brien’s) share much more in common than originally thought.
My purpose in this paper is to consider Heroides X in the context of funeral elegy and lamentation ritual in the ancient world. Ovid’s epistle, written in Ariadne’s voice, transports us to the moment of her desertion on Naxos. Through Ariadne’s telling of her own experience, Ovid both invites a sincere empathetic response and plays an intellectual game involving genre. Heroides X functions both as an erotic love poem and as a funerary lament by Ariadne for her own death, the latter of which is apparent through Ovid’s knowing use of gendered conventions of mourning. Focusing on this under-explored aspect reveals a further dimension of rhetorical intricacy to the text, allowing the elegiac form, Ariadne’s experience and description of her abandonment, the emphasized contrast between untroubled past and miserable present, and Ariadne’s shifting between inertia and hysteria to be understood as informed by Greco-Roman lamentation rituals.
My thesis offers an interpretation of the literary purpose of the Germania informed by close analysis of the text and consideration of the literary and historical context of the document. I first contend that Tacitus positions the Germani as a foil to the Roman people and intentionally portrays the Germani as morally pure but primitive in order to comment on moral decay in Rome while simultaneously affirming the superior cultural sophistication of Roman society. In the subsequent section of the paper, I focus on the geographic backdrop of the ethnography and argue that Tacitus constructs the landscape in a manner that subverts Domitian’s claim of victory against the Chatti. I assert that while Tacitus seeks counter the Domitiantic narrative of Germanic conquest, by self-consciously inventing, rather than simply describing, the land and the people and by establishing himself as an authority on the region, he literarily colonizes Germania himself.
