Word: amatoria
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Getting to this point logically is harder than it sounds. The love-as- cultural-delusion argument has long seemed unassailable. What actually accounts for the emotion, according to this scenario, is that people long ago made the mistake of taking fanciful literary tropes seriously. Ovid's Ars Amatoria is often cited as a major source of misreadings, its instructions followed, its ironies ignored. Other prime suspects include the 12th century troubadours in Provence who more or less invented the Art of Courtly Love, an elaborate, etiolated ritual for idle noblewomen and aspiring swains that would have been broken to bits...
Five hundred years later, the press is still in the classics business; Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Book I, for example, is a recent offering. But the Oxford imprint now spans all of human knowledge, from the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary (floccinaucinihilipilification, the act of estimating as worthless) to tomes as obscure as Zoologist Arthur Young's Anatomy of the Nervous System of Octopus Vulgaris, which sells 15 copies a year. The largest academic press in the world, Oxford has 3,000 staffers working in Britain and in 23 overseas branches from New York to Nigeria...
Such classic examples illustrate the classic dilemma: What is pornography and what is outspoken art? Innumerable erotic works, from Ovid's Ars amatoria to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, in time assumed the stature of classics. Innumerable others were denounced as wicked when they first appeared. Yet almost everyone agrees that there is such a thing as pornography and that it is bad. No less an authority than Henry Miller recently denounced pornography as "a leering or lecherous disguise" that has helped make sexuality joyless. On any level of creative intent, it is hard to defend the bulk...
...Carmina Amatoria," Professor Rand, Sever...
...Carmina Amatoria," Professor Rand, Sever...
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