READING ROOM: Published in May 2025, the anthology Parentheses of Reception explores how the parenthesis, a rhetorical figure of speech and thought, can offer fresh insights into classical reception studies by conceptualizing Greco-Roman antiquity as being both “inserted into” and “remaining apart” from the present. In her chapter on artists Cy Twombly and Francesca Woodman, classics scholar Brooke Holmes analyzes their works and relationship to the mythological figures of Achilles and Daphne respectively. On Woodman, she writes:

“… Woodman undermines the fixity of a classicized female body by challenging the petrification of Daphne’s metamorphosis and displacing her own representation of the nymph’s arboreal hybridity from the Ovidian scene of sexual violence altogether. Her camera keeps moving. Woodman thus refuses the idea that Daphne can ever be captured and possessed as a universal icon of anything.”

Holmes delves into the artistic re-interpretation of classical mythology in both Twombly’s and Woodman's work, highlighting ongoing conversations between the artwork and the source material, emphasizing in particular how Woodman’s serial reworkings of Daphne—marked by repetition and variation—actively resist fixed interpretations and destabilize the notion of a singular “real” image:

“There is no teleology to the myth, no moment set in stone. Rather, Woodman’s Daphne restlessly disturbs the edges of a classicized female form… In so doing, she repeatedly drew attention to the conditions of perception, above all on the ‘subject of art’ delivered in the guise of the universal. Like Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam, then, Woodman’s Daphne repositions us as scholars of classical reception who are never outside the work but, rather, in some parenthetical fold with its own interwoven layers.”

Holmes, Brooke. “On Parenthetical Receptions of the Classical: Intermediality, Nesting, and the Gender of the Universal (Twombly’s Achilles, Woodman’s Daphne).” In Parentheses of Reception (ed. Hamilton, John T., Sistakou, Evina and Vöhler, Martin). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2025.

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READING ROOM highlights past essays, reviews, and interviews about Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, and George Woodman that provide new insights and lenses through which to read and understand their work.