To whom it may concern: The dynamics of address in ancient Roman, Greek, and Chinese poetry

Studying address presents an opportunity to examine both the ritualized performance context of ancient poetry and the social role that poetry plays in a community. To address someone or something is ultimately to recognize the poem not as a thing unto itself but as a kind of dialogue between different parties or beings that compose a society. Who participates in the poem's conversation? And what is it that is being negotiated through the poem? I use these questions to understand the dynamics of address in the Graeco-Roman poetic tradition and the Classical Chinese. In comparing these two traditions, I am able to uncover the deep assumptions about address---and poetry---that each of them makes.; I begin in Chapter One by studying how ancient Greek and Chinese poetry use nonsense sounds to introduce an address. In both traditions, nonsense sounds (like "o!") help create the performative-ritual occasion that characterizes early instances of invocational address. Moreover, a comparison of vocables in Greek and Chinese poetry suggests how the different writing systems might contribute to the creation of voice in these two traditions: character-based writing and its perceived "natural" relationship to the world leads to an affective-expressive model of the poetry in which the poem is understood to be a "natural" extension of the self and the world. By contrast, the Greek alphabet complements a perception of writing as unnatural, an artifice that depends upon speech for meaning.; In Chapter Two, I look at instances of divine invocation in the archaic Greek lyric and argue that performative invocations initiate an exchange of services between the god and the performer, with the voice of the performer being the site of exchange. Textually-based invocations, however, create a conflict between the performative "I" of an oral invocation and the more fixed "I" of text. In Chapter Three, I turn to ancient Chinese poetry and explore how address works not only invocationally (as does the Greek) but also as a pure form of calling out, where the emphasis is not on who is calling and who is being addressed, but rather rests upon the action itself. In Chapter Four, I look at the role of apostrophe in the poetry of Catullus and argue that for him, as for other Roman poets, apostrophe is a rhetorical gesture without the invocational power of the archaic Greek lyric. Rather, apostrophe, for Catullus, is a textual act that constitutes a form of aggression upon the listener. In Chapter Five, I compare the poetry of Ovid with that of Tao Qian. Although both these poets are acutely conscious of their poetry as text, Tao Qian---coming from the Chinese tradition---perceives writing as the only possible way to express his surplus energy. Ovid, by contrast, finds himself textually exiled by his own writing project and becomes, in the process, an alienated and dislocated voice.