Kyle Khellaf

By the time Tacitus began composing histories, the digression had long been a mainstay of the genre. Tacitus’ works show a keen awareness of this tradition, including multiple instances of ethnographic, etiological, and wonder-driven digression. This paper explores two unique Tacitean innovations. First, it examines his shift from historical preface to digression for describing the challenges to historiography under imperial rule (Ann. 4.32–33). In so doing, it illustrates how the digression reproduces in narrative form key Tacitean criticisms about the loss of freedom and the resulting increase in trivial subject matters. Second, it extends this analysis to three of Tacitus’ pseudo-digressions (Agr. 28, Hist. 2.8–9, Ann. 2.39–40) — paradoxographical episodes that masquerade as digressions — which recount rebellious acts by seemingly insignificant groups or individuals of servile status, yet contain significant disruptive potential. Furthermore, it contends that these seemingly distinct innovations to digression should be read in tandem as a deliberate narratological strategy in Tacitus’ criticisms of imperial Rome.

This paper explores how Roman historians (especially Livy and Sallust) use digressions as narrative border spaces to reproduce the historical experience of human migration and hybridity. The paper situates this practice through a variety of frameworks that include narratology, nomadology, hodology, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and even contemporary visual culture.

For the full article and volume by Aske Damtoft Poulsen and Arne Jönsson, see https://brill.com/view/title/59307

This paper serves as both an introduction to and a standalone article within the Ramus special volume, "Deterritorializing Classics: Deleuze, Guattari, and Antiquity." It examines Deleuze and Guattari’s frequent use of the classics in their writings, and how their theories can in turn shed new light on classical hermeneutics. It argues that antiquity, with its ongoing assemblage of rereadings over many millennia, is an inherently fluid, evolving entity whose historical expression is best understood in conceptual, nonempirical terms.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ramus/article/classical-nomadologies/B30008CD370ADE65B4988967FB15A297/share/84d46549721db3adde942eee0b36aed2f1493e4c

In recent decades, Latin elegy and Augustan poetry have witnessed a number of studies employing psychoanalysis as their primary theoretical framework. Moreover, many of these readings have characterized elegy as a schizoid, incoherent, or hybrid genre. This paper seeks to extend such claims by reading the Roman elegiac poet Propertius alongside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's well-known critique of psychoanalysis, Anti-Oedipus. By using schizoanalysis to read Propertius' first book of poems, we are encouraged to see how our reconstructed classical works consist of numerous competing voices, extending from the Augustan socioeconomic and historical influences on the poetic corpus to the ideological effects of many centuries of editorial interventions. In this manner, we can better witness the productive force of elegiac desire—from the schizoid addressees within the Monobiblos who struggle to escape the libidinal economies of their mistress Cynthia in the wake of Augustan marriage legislation, to the competing claims of textual critics, who underwrite the elegiac poems with their own unconscious desires.

This paper examines the central role Polybius played in shaping the historiographical tradition of digression. Although the literary practice can already be traced from archaic poetry down through the fragmentary historians of the 4th Century BCE, it was ultimately Polybius who defined the excursus as a fundamental element of historiography and first delineated rules for its usage as part of the proper “interweaving” of events (symplokē). These demarcations were subsequently reexamined by Roman annalistic historians and Greco-Roman rhetoricians who found reason either to reaffirm or to revise them in light of new developments to the historiographical genre.

Masters Thesis for the University of Georgia:

This study examines the bizarre account of the mutiny of the Usipi in Tacitus’ Agricola. It argues that this centrally placed, ostensible digression actually functions as a mise en abyme for the work. Just as the Agricola presents its readers with a complex series of generic and thematic elements, so too does the mutiny narrative contain all of these features and reflect them in a single episode: historiography and the commemoration of great deeds, anti-Domitianic rhetoric and the central theme of liberty versus servitude, ethnography and foreign interactions, and circumnavigation as a symbol for the conquest of Britain. Moreover, by taking these elements to various extremes, the mutiny of the Usipi exhibits the tendency of the mise en abyme to distort the work that it reflects.

Special volume of the journal Ramus, with papers by Richard Ellis, Zina Giannopoulou, Ben Radcliffe, Hannah-Marie Chidwick, Richard Hutchins, Page duBois, Nancy Worman, Assaf Krebs, and Michiel van Veldhuizen.

Full issue available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ramus/issue/FF8D4D41FC81E6DF608A83E9C655D1C0