Approximative Similes in Ovid. Incest and Doubling

This paper is about the pleasures and dangers of getting too close, about a desire to elide difference that operates on both a sexual and a textual plane. My subject is Ovid at his most seriously flirtatious, for this desire is at once the source of typically playful – and, as we say, Ovidian – effects of illusion and mistaken identity, and the obsessive urge that keeps the poet writing. This kind of serioludere is a central topic of my book Ovid’spoeticsofillusion ; the present discussion ma...