On 1st October, Martin Michálek defended his PhD thesis on Horace’s Odes, titled Horace Made Strange: Carpe Diem as Mood, Reception as Attunement (abstract below). Martin wrote his thesis with Prof. Shane Butler as advisor. He defended capably before a full and captivated audience, with Professor Eugenio Refini (NYU) as external examiner. Martin has already been snapped up for a post-doctoral fellowship at the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance here at JHU, a position he will assume in January 2025. Many congratulations from all of us, Martin! Exegisti monumentum aere perennius.
Horace Made Strange: Carpe Diem as Mood, Reception as Attunement examines Horace’s carpe diem odes, noting how landscape, atmosphere, and mood participate in poetic production. Roughly eighteen poems are usually grouped together as Horace’s carpe diem odes, though how this designation came about—and how it affects our understanding of Horace—has not been adequately studied. This thesis offers a history of how this happened, suggesting that thesepoems are aligned not only by convivial motifs, but also by a shared mood (Stimmung). However, far from reading carpe diem as a hedonistic imperative to enjoy the present, Horace Made Strange argues that Horace’s poetry suggests that pleasure comes from an accumulation of the past. This longing is not unlike the engine driving classical reception itself. Taking up carpe diem as a heuristic device for how reception works, this dissertation then charts Horace’s diffuse and sometimes unseen influence on a series of modern figures who use his carpe diem odes to think through gender, queerness, climate, addiction, and poetic production itself.