https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/317 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/774 “Preposterous Poetics and the Erotics of Death” looks at two crucial issues of late antique poetics and the representation of gender through the Dionysiaca of Nonnus. First, it discusses how Nonnus constructs a narrative which links mythic stories in a willfully confused chronological patterning, which allows events in the future of narrative time to bear on the current story-telling. This is explored both in its aesthetics of exemplarity and in its theological understanding of narrative time. “Preposterous” is understood thus in its etymological sense of the confusion of the “pre-” and the “post-”. Second, this article explores through such a model of poetics how Nonnus represents a bizarre and un-paralleled scene of necrophiliac desire on the battle-field. On the one hand, this disturbing scene of corrupt erotic desire in action is expressed through the model of Achilles and Penthesileia (an event far in the future for the time of the Dionysiaca); on the other hand, it utilizes a strange narrative technique of the narrator describing the scene, followed immediately by the desire-stuck soldier also describing the scene from another perspective. The article explores how this doubled representation opens a question – a question that goes to the heart of late antique poetics – of what it means to repeat, to paraphrase, to rehearse the inherited language of classical, epic sexual desire in the new world of the Christian empire. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:13:37 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 14:29:04 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/774 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/308 This paper reconsiders the narrative of his own death delivered by the shade of Deiphobus in Aeneid 6 (509-530). This episode is usually compared to Agamemnon’s encounter with Odysseus in the first nekuia of the Odyssey, but I argue that the underworld meeting of Agamemnon and Amphimedon in the second nekuia (Odyssey 24.121-190) is also an important intertextual model. Deiphobus and Amphimedon both accuse a woman – Helen, Penelope – of conspiring with their sexual rivals – Menelaus, Odysseus – to bring about their deaths. Yet comparison of Amphimedon’s and Deiphobus’ narratives highlights the misleading and self-aggrandizing character of their rhetoric and raises questions about how women are represented by male narrators and by the epic tradition more broadly. This paper suggests that Deiphobus’ narrative works together with other competing and contradictory views of Helen within the Aeneid in order to fracture the epic tradition’s univocal representation of her – and women more generally – as casus belli. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:38:22 +0200 jeu., 23 mars 2023 09:48:34 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/308