Metamorphoses Reimagined - by Michael Marder

About the Book

Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid's masterpiece that decenters the human.

Book Synopsis

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and stars--or something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovid's work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans' place in it.

Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid's masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres--letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others--some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder's 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 Ovid's 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.

Review Quotes

Marder has metamorphized The Metamorphosis. Meaning, he hasn't changed a thing. Except for any simply, naïve, and metaphysical notion of eternal "change" which is, as it should be, transformed into the inscrutable "M"-process that Ovid put in literary code and into which Marder allowed himself to be absorbed. Marder was metamorphized. Into a book beyond books, full of elements beyond names, the absolute gift to the reader.--Marcus Coelen, psychoanalyst, University of Munich

Michael Marder's book is a metamorphosing one. It exceeds the images and the imagination connected to the desire for transformation. It shows what common hermeneutics forgets, namely, the courage to see-listen-think-write-recall-imagine in one gesture, a vibrating hyphen of every form of existence, without any attempt to unite and synthetize differences. It is more than the rewriting or rereading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a writing-reading-listening-seeing at the same time, letting metamorphoses be metamorphosing in words-images-sounds. It shows that metamorphoses imitate clouds. It reminds us, epigones of a world of continuous destruction, that our ideas, memories and expectations of transformation cry out to be transformed: that metamorphosis itself is waiting for its own metamorphosis.--Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, coauthor of Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking, Writing

Michael Marder's Metamorphoses Reimagined is a literary triumph, a transmutation more than a translation, and should be widely read. Marder's retelling of Ovid is radical in intent and kaleidoscopic in its choice of devices. It brings the time and detail of epic together with the time and detail of the contemporary in innovative, experimental ways. There is something especially cinematic to this poet-philosopher's vivid re-narrating of the Latin original into a montage of performance and staging directions, utterance and annotation. As he deconstructs and recomposes Metamorphoses through a constellation of genres, Marder reclaims the baroque for us, in its defiantly transgressive and unpredictable excess--as a technique of being and redrafting our relationship to the world, of recrafting stories and songs as we come to grips with our turbulent Now.--Ranjit Hoskote, author of To Break and To Branch

About the Author

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain, and senior fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Germany. His previous Columbia University Press books include Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts (2019), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (2023).