He was taught to extend narrative scenarios from a briefly summarized plot and trained to find, in the controuersiae, various arguments to support, in succession, both parties involved in a trial and, in the suasoriae, to deliberate, by impersonating mythological or historical charac-ter(s), before taking a particular decision at a crucial moment. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid was a brilliant student of the rhetorician Arellius Fuscus (Contr. All of these replies constitute an indirect hint of a hidden desire that cannot be clearly expressed or, what is even more interesting, perceived as such by the speaker himself. I argue that ambiguity is a linguistic device employed by Ovid to give more complexity to his psychological analysis of love and, more precisely, to explore, in a very subtle way, how difficult human relations are to grasp and understand, even for those concerned. I examine under what circumstances Ovid attributes ambiguous replies referring to erotic desires and erotic feelings to certain characters. This paper focuses on a special type of ingenious expression used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses: the ambigua uerba. The comparison is rewarding from another perspective as well: it illuminates textuality in the movie and filmic aspects of the text. In other words, not only can we better appreciate the role of the female voice in her after having read Ovid’s Echo, but by considering its protagonist Samantha we can appreciate aspects of Echo never considered before. While reception studies more traditionally seek to reconstruct and demonstrate influences of one work on another, I argue that Donna Haraway’s “diffractive reading” and Hartmut Böhme’s “allelopoiesis” can generate complex and nuanced reading since they productively illuminate the interdependency of the two comparanda. How productive can a comparison be between an ancient Latin text and a modern film? What are the methodological implications and how might this comparison fundamentally change the perception and interpretation of both text and film? In this article Spike Jonze’s film her (2013) and the episode of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 3) are discussed together, not because it is possible to establish a direct influence of the Latin poem on the work of the American director, but because of a shared central theme, that of voice, in particular a female voice.
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