Metamorphoses Reimagined

In Ovids Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and starsor something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovids work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans place in it. Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovids masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genresletters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among otherssome picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marders metamorphoses invert protagonists relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today. Providing fresh perspective on Ovids classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.