Dr Kathrin Winter

Profile

I am interested in Latin literature (especially of the 1st century BCE and CE), literary theory, and the possible ways to think one with the other. Currently, I am working on a book on vignettes in Latin literature, that is, small spatial scenes which are remarkably vivid and often fraught with meaning even though they are brief und hardly offer any detailed information.

At the ICS, I would like to work on a part of this project: In Horace’s Roman Odes, there are surprisingly many vignettes: the girl who, from the walls of the besieged city, watches her beloved being killed, the dauntless man cannot be shaken by any turmoil around him, the giant who is repelled while storming Mount Olympus, Regulus’s resolute departure from the senate, or the bucolic ambience of an evening. These vignettes are vivid because they subliminally evoke a spatial scene and provide a viewpoint from which the surroundings are perceived and towards which all sense perception is geared (like the origo in a coordinate system). Horace charges these spatial scenes with more associations, emotions and meaning, thereby turning the spatial situation into stance towards the world and reflecting on how to conduct oneself, for example, in the face of adversity.