Chapter 4 - Loving Writing

Summary

Chapter takes up masochism at the level of literary form, focusing on Naso’s resistance to closure and desire for perpetually renewed agitation , as manifested in 1) his beloved verse form, the elegiac couplet (in which the cadence of the hexameter is twice suspended); 2) his finessing of possible endpoints within the book, especially at book junctures; and 3) his self-defeating deployment of rhetorical persuasion (a failure that ensures the need for more rhetoric). Key poems: Amores 1.1, 3.1, 1.4, 1.5, 3.7, 1.11