https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/490 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/486 Identifying an allusion to classical Greco-Roman poetry in a monologue (or prosopopoeia) of a cowherd by the fourth century Latin poet, Paulinus of Nola (c. 18.276-80), this article explains the emergence of the category of labor as a response to a process of Christian radicalization from the representation of erotic paroxysm in Sappho (fr. 31: “I see nothing in my eyes”), through the classical Latin poets Catullus (c. 51) and Horace (c. 1.13, 22). In view of Paulinus’ renunciation of wealth and repurposing of elite culture for the poor, his reception of Sappho suggests that ancient men of property could recognize the perspectives of their subordinates and resist their own political interests through poetic production, and specifically metapoetics, as a result of the ambiguity of embodiment and sensation posited in the modern philosophy of phenomenology and commonalities of gender and class explicated in post/modern social theory. Attributing the combination of these factors to a “deviation” in “focalization” (D. Fowler) and a “doubling” of “consciousness” (J. Winkler) in the producer of the poem (Paulinus), the article uses the Marxist-feminist concept of standpoint to develop a phenomenological approach to literary history, which promises to recover, not the experience of the poor and marginal (or “subaltern”) in ancient literature, but the form of their experience, as an “imputation of consciousness” (G. Lukács), which may well be a distinctive mark of literature. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:52:49 +0200 jeu., 07 déc. 2023 16:29:05 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/486 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