Caesar’s Comet, the Julian Star, and the Invention of Augustus
Octavian is credited with turning a comet seen in 44 b.c.e.  into a symbol of Julius Caesar’s divinity and using it to advance his own political aims. Yet historical evidence argues against this account. Moreover, representations of the sidus Iulium (Julian star) on coins and in poetry adopt diverse and autonomous perspectives on the princeps. The idea that Augustus circulated the sidus as part of an image campaign seems instead to originate with Ovid, whose deification narrative at Metamorphoses 15.745–851 retrojected the princeps ’s mature power onto his early career and fueled the belief that Augustus gained and maintained power through propaganda.
The Transformations of the Writing Body: Rhetoric, Monumental Art, and Poetry in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
This article analyses the power dynamics that Ovid stages in the Metamorphoses as interplay of rhetoric, monumental art, and poetry. It argues that (1) the transformations of gods can be read as a metaphor of rhetoric subjecting the audience to the speaker’s will; (2) that the products of the transformations of humans can be regarded as notional monuments to divine power; (3) that, for Ovid, all successful ideological constructs are based on a similar combination of rhetorical manipulation and “monumentalization”; (4) that, at the same time, Ovid casts metamorphosis as a product of the ability of the human imagination to recognize a human presence behind every non-human object, including the “monuments” constructed by superhuman powers; (5) that Ovid conceives of the “re-humanizing” effect of poetry as a function of its ability to make the audience recognize themselves in it; and (6) that the immortality that Ovid attributes to his own text is a function of his writing producing a similar effect on the readers.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.