The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic - Hardcover

Wofford, Susanne Lindgren

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804719179 ISBN 13: 9780804719179

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1992

Synopsis

This book examines the ways that Classical and Renaissance epic poems often work against their expressed moral and political values. It combines a formal and tropological analysis that stresses difference and disjunction with a political analysis of the epic's figurative economy. It offers an interpretation of three epic poems - Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and Spencer's Faerie Queene - that focuses on the way these texts make apparent the aesthetic, moral, and political difference that constitutes them, and sketches, in conclusion, two alternative resolutions of such division in Milton's Paradise Lost and Cervantes' Don Quixote, an 'epic' in prose. The book outlines a theory of how and why epic narrative may be said to subvert certain of its constitutive claims while articulating a cultural argument of which it becomes the contradictory paradigm. The author focuses on the aesthetic and ideological work accomplished by poetic figure in these narratives, and understands ideology as a figurative, substitutive system that resembles and uses the system of tropes. She defines the ideological function of tropes in narrative and the often contradictory way in which narratives acknowledge and seek to efface the transformative functions of ideology. Beginning with what it describes as a dual tendency within the epic simile (toward metaphor in the transformations of ideology; toward metonymy as it maintains a structure of difference), the book defines the politics of the simile in epic narrative and identifies metalepsis as the defining trope of ideology. It demonstrates the political and poetic costs of the structural reliance of allegorical narrative on catachresis and shows how the narrator's use of prosopopoeia to assert political authority reshapes the figurative economy of the epic. The book is particularly innovative in being the first to apply to the epic the set of questions posed by the linking of the theory of rhetoric and the theory of ideology. It argues that historical pressures on a text are often best seen as a dialectic in which ideology shapes poetic process while poetry counters, resists, figures, or generates the tropes of ideology itself.

About this title

Review:

'A powerful, compelling, and original study. It will make a difference; it will stir up healthy argument; it will suggest a new way to deal with the currently pressing controversy between the claims of formalist and political orientations toward reading. The major accomplishment of the book is the deployment of the basic action/figure schema in the service of a transgressive approach that might be termed politicoformalist. And the major strength of the book is the profundity, originality, and persuasiveness of the reading of texts generated by the application of that schema.'Harry Berger, Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0804719179
• ISBN 13: 9780804719179
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496