Melissa Mueller (Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst) will give a talk entitled, "In the Bardo with Tithonos: Reading Sappho with Homer and Eve Sedgwick" on Friday, November 5, 2021 at 4:30 PM.

Abstract: This talk explores the queer asynchronies of Sappho’s Tithonos Poem. I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “bardo”—suspension between death and rebirth—to articulate the in-between position of Tithonos as he transitions from a human into an insect body. And I suggest that Dawn’s embrace of her soon-to-be-non-human lover resonates, on many levels, with Sedgwick’s own experience of living with a terminal illness, on the threshold between life and death. The problem of asynchrony—of two beings who are trapped in distinct temporalities—informs the singer’s lament (particularly the verb στεναχίσδω) and shapes our awareness of the unvoiced, unarticulated transformation which awaits Tithonos.