Ovid's ecological disasters: scalar zoom and the challenges of narrative time Alison Sharrock (Manchester)

Annual lecture of the Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies

**Abstract**
Although climate change seems to have speeded up in the last few years, it still runs at a speed that is not easy to encompass in the standard narrative times of most literary forms. Disasters can be a way of imaginatively conceiving environmental problems at a pace that is, or feels, more in keeping with lived time, although it brings its own distortions for the sake of the story. In this paper, I explore Ovid's accounts of global catastrophe, which I read through the lens of contemporary environmental problems, and in comparison with some typical modern solutions to the problem of narrative scale around disaster. While being very cautious about the claims that can be made for classical literature in this field, I tentatively propose the possibility that the Metamorphoses, as a continuous but episodic history of the universe, might something particular to offer to literary mechanisms for thinking about the environment.

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