Skip to content
1981
image of Voice and species in the Ovide moralisé

Abstract

In this article, I show that the author of the exaggerates vocal difference when compared to Ovid’s in the case of most instances of non-human metamorphoses. The exceptions are winged animals, especially birds, where the author of instead minimizes vocal difference or suppresses it entirely. In the second section, I explore what this conception of shared human and avian might mean for the authorial conception of language in . I suggest that the author intended to emphasize humans’ frequent use of Jakobson’s phatic function of language, a function often attributed to birds by various thinkers (including Jakobson himself and Isidore of Seville). Moreover, I suggest he draws attention to a shared human and avian propensity for quotation and for sonic repetition. After noting the relevance of the question of intention in language production in the context of debates about large language models (LLMs), I suggest that we are, in the author’s view, probably all stochastic parrots.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00080_1
2024-06-17
2024-09-20
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Agamben, Giorgio (2004), The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Agamben, Giorgio (2018), ‘Experimentum vocis’, What Is Philosophy?, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 128.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin (2016), ‘Ovid and ovidianism’, in R. Copeland (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1, 800–1558, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 187208.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Bender, Emily M., Gebru, Timnit, McMillan-Major, Angelina and Shmitchell, Shmargaret (2021), ‘On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?’, in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency: FAccT 21, New York: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 61023.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bettini, Maurizio (2008), Voci: antropologia sonora del mondo antico, Turin: G. Einaudi.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Brucker, Charles (ed.) (1991), Marie de France: Les Fables: edition critique accompagnée d’une introduction, d’une traduction, de notes et d’un glossaire, Louvain: Peeters.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Butler, Shane (2015), The Ancient Phonograph, New York: Zone Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Butler, Shane (2021), ‘Animal listening’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 6:1, pp. 2738.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Clark, James G., et al. (eds) (2011), Ovid in the Middle Ages, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Dante Alighieri (1996), De vulgari eloquentia (trans. S. Botterill), New York: Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. de Boer, Charles (ed.) (1915–38), Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorième siècle, vol. 5, Amsterdam: J. Müller.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Derrida, Jacques (1996), Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine, Paris: Galilée.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Derrida, Jacques (2006), L’Animal que donc je suis, Paris: Galilée.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Eco, Umberto, Lambertini, Roberto, Marmo, Constantino and Tabarroni, Andrea (1989), ‘On animal language in the medieval classification of signs’, in U. Eco and C. Marmo (eds), On the Medieval Theory of Signs, Amsterdam and PA: John Benjamins, pp. 341.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Isidore (2004), Etimologie o origini (ed. A. V. Canale), Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Isidore (2006), The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (trans. S. A Barney), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Jakobson, Roman (1987), ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds), Language in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, pp. 6294.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Leach, Elizabeth Eva (2007), Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Lecoy, Félix (1988), ‘Ancien français beste mue’, Mélanges de philologie et de littérature romanes, Geneva: Droz, pp. 15760.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Murray, K. Sarah-Jane and Matthieu, Boyd (2023), The Medieval French Ovide moralisé: An English Translation, Woodbridge, VA, Suffolk, VA and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Neumark, Norie (2017), Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Ovid (2004a), Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation (trans. D. A. Raeburn), London: Penguin.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Ovid (2004b), Oxford Classical Texts: P. Ovidi Nasonis: Metamorphoses, R. J. Tarrant (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, https://www-oxfordscholarlyeditions-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/display/10.1093/actrade/9780198146667.book.1/actrade-9780198146667-book-1. Accessed 15 December 2022.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Possamaï-Pérez, Marylène (2006), L’Ovide moralisé: Essai d’interprétation, Paris: Champion.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Possamaï-Pérez, Marylène (2014), ‘La figure de l’oiseau dans l’Ovide Moralisé’, in C. Connochie-Bourgne (ed.), Déduits d’oiseaux au Moyen Âge, Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, pp. 26981.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Simpson, James R. (2000), ‘“Speak of this if you can”: Voice, pleasure and prophylaxis in the Ovide moralisé’, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition in Medieval French Narrative, Oxford and New York: P. Lang, pp. 13390.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Tarrant, R. J. (1987), ‘Toward a typology of interpolation in Latin poetry’, Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974–2014), 117, pp. 28198.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Tarrant, R. J. (2000), ‘The soldier in the garden and other intruders in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 100, pp. 42538.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Zingesser, Eliza (2017), ‘Pidgin poetics: Bird talk in medieval France and Occitania’, New Medieval Literatures, 17, pp. 6280.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Zingesser, Eliza (2020), ‘Chrétien the jay: Avian rhetoric in philomena’, Rhetorica, 38:2, pp. 15679.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00080_1
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error