Playing at Lyric’s Boundaries: Dreaming Forward in Book Two of Horace’s Sermones

In this paper I look at the ways in which certain poems of Sermones Book Two and the Epodes routinely look past their own generic horizons to spy on an alternate, and highly idealized, poetic landscape that lies just ahead in the poet’s career. Like rich fields waiting to be developed and tended, the Odes occupy the poet’s time and thoughts in the late 30’s B.C.E. These ‘singing’ poems, like a newly purchased farm, await his full-time attention, even while he is still deeply enmeshed in the life of the city and the generic enterprises that need to be finished there. The Odes, poems given special urgency by Octavian’s victory at Actium, are thus constructed as a dreamscape that the poet wants to enter but, as yet, cannot. To make my case, I focus especially on Sermones 2.6, treating that poem’s many extra-generic glosses not only as a means of locating the host-genre’s center, but as a way of chafing at its too narrow limits, and perhaps also as a way of signaling how the poet intends to break new ground in the Odes, as a poet deeply committed to mode-mixing, variation, and ironic play. The pressures and restrictions that come with being a satirist in 31-30 B.C.E. are played out in this poem. And Horace’s own extra-generic pipe-dreaming, I suggest, is at the heart of its concluding fable

Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states’ urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in ‘new’ mining countries and the slow-down in ‘old’ mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide cross-section of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone)

Playing at Lyric’s Boundaries: Dreaming Forward in Book Two of Horace’s Sermones

In this paper I look at the ways in which certain poems of Sermones Book Two and the Epodes routinely look past their own generic horizons to spy on an alternate, and highly idealized, poetic landscape that lies just ahead in the poet’s career. Like rich fields waiting to be developed and tended, the Odes occupy the poet’s time and thoughts in the late 30’s B.C.E. These ‘singing’ poems, like a newly purchased farm, await his full-time attention, even while he is still deeply enmeshed in the life of the city and the generic enterprises that need to be finished there. The Odes, poems given special urgency by Octavian’s victory at Actium, are thus constructed as a dreamscape that the poet wants to enter but, as yet, cannot. To make my case, I focus especially on Sermones 2.6, treating that poem’s many extra-generic glosses not only as a means of locating the host-genre’s center, but as a way of chafing at its too narrow limits, and perhaps also as a way of signaling how the poet intends to break new ground in the Odes, as a poet deeply committed to mode-mixing, variation, and ironic play. The pressures and restrictions that come with being a satirist in 31-30 B.C.E. are played out in this poem. And Horace’s own extra-generic pipe-dreaming, I suggest, is at the heart of its concluding fable