Global Antiquity Faculty Lunch Series
Adriana Vazquez (Classics, UCLA)
“Por Mares Nunca D’antes Navegados…”: Poetic Primacy in Arcadian Epic and Caminões’s The Lusiads
Friday, February 28 | Royce 306 | 12:00 pm
This presentation is an excerpt of a monograph on the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period and its reception of antiquity, titled “Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America.” The talk highlights statements of poetic primacy in two epics produced under the umbrella of 18th century Brazilian Arcadianism, each of which considers moments in the Portuguese settlement of Brazil. I argue that both epics conceive of poetic primacy as an adaptation of colonial concepts of ‘newness,’ reflecting the crisis in European thinking ignited by the apparent lacunae in ancient geographic knowledge concerning the so-called New World. I additionally consider the intermediary of Camões’ The Lusiads as instrumental to the formalization of a lexicon of poetic primacy in the Arcadian epics.
About the Speaker: Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the 17th- and 18th-centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, which analyzes the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy that placed itself in dialogue with the ancient poetic tradition. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception.