Ovid’s The Art of Love: A Socio-Critical Reading

Abstract

This paper, framed within the general field of Gender Studies, offers a reading of Ars Amatoria, the poem by Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid, from the first century BC. The analysis draws on the contributions of Sociocriticism and approaches the text through the methodology of the Semiotics of Statements.

For the purposes of the analysis carried out in these pages, Sociocriticism provides the fundamental theoretical approach. This field seeks to discover how the social dimension is inscribed in texts. In other words, its aim is to identify the forms of articulation between two systems: the textual system and the social system.

In this particular study, I seek to identify the ideologemes present in Ovid’s poem. To do so, I follow Edmond Cros’s concept of the ideologeme, which he defines as a “semiotic-ideological microsystem underlying a functional and meaningful unit of discourse”—the lexia. The components of this microsystem are semes and social values, which fluctuate according to historical circumstances.

Two hypotheses guide this work: the first is theoretical in nature, and the second is methodological. First, in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, the words domina, which would normally refer to the “mistress” or Roman housewife, and virtus constitute ideologemes insofar as they function as sites of enunciation where new semantic contents and social values are generated and merged, thus establishing the historical and social coordinates of the text. Second, ideologemes can be identified by means of contextual definitions, an instrument developed by the Semiotics of Statements.

The methodology of the Semiotics of Statements provides a series of analytical operations that work on what is actually stated, making it possible to recover the meanings attributed to terms according to the material and positive context in which they appear. The conclusions reached in this study allow me to confirm that this methodology is suitable for identifying ideologemes.

The main contribution of this paper, therefore, lies in demonstrating the effectiveness of the analytical tools of the Semiotics of Statements for conducting research from a sociocritical perspective.