Tilted Gazing: American Women Writers and the Tenuousness of Classics

The 2025 annual Classics and English lecture will be delivered by Dr Katerina Stergiopoulou (University of Edinburgh), in the Ioannou Centre lecture theatre and online at 2pm on Monday 2 June: 'In this paper, I take on recent trends in the study of classical reception that focus on "weak links" (Zerba 2021) or "classical absences" and "oblique classicisms" (Jansen 2022), and consider their possible intersections with questions of gender in the work of American women writers of the last half century, from Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich to Harryette Mullen and Maggie Nelson. I will first examine the "occlusion" of classics in these writers’ work and then turn to its interaction with the feminist and queer discourses also present therein. Is the relationship between the two antagonistic, reparative, indifferent or something else entirely?'