Music, Meaning, and the Muses: Teaching Latin Intertextuality with Wild Nothing’s “Paradise”

This paper discusses how to utilize a music video to teach Latin intertextuality. It shows how to encourage students to be aware of the way authors and musicians establish connections between their own works and those of their predecessors. The video features “signposts” for allusive material and an extended quotation that enhances the meaning of the song. Similar effects can be discovered in the analysis of Latin poetry and a case study shows how intertextual echoes in Vergil adumbrate his own literary antecedents and his creative use of his source material. This instructional strategy not only assists students to see the larger context of the Latin poems and to delve into their poetics, but also illuminates how visual clues operate within Latin poetry.