Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real


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The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's.
Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, Lacan, and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time.
Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum.
</p>Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real Review
Blame:"Maitre, there seems to be a Symbolic in the Imaginary of my Real," is a sentence that would not be entirely out of place in this book. The wedding of much theory (Jameson, Foucault, Lacan) is consonant with the bounty of citations philosopher Slavoj Zizek receives, seemingly more than any philologist who actually works on Roman elegy. It also seemed that fewer passages of poetry, but more selected words, received discussion than a more comprehensive study might merit, but the author does well to traverse the lifespan of the art and relate its habits to the concerns of the day. There are a couple of textual errors and one of the sources is cited in text without a bibliographical referent.Praise:
It's always time for someone to discuss the context from which the genre of love elegy emerged. Paul Allen Miller shares his fascination with this poetry that emerged suddenly, sparked, and then disappeared all within a period of fifty years or so. His interpretations and methods of reading elegy are generally smart, though I remain disappointed that some of the uncertainty concerning love elegy finds a kind of analytical resolution in the clarity of psychoanalytic discourse. The chapter on reading the poems of Tibullus is utterly fascinating. The introductory chapter cleanly exhibits the psychoanalytic terminology used throughout in such a way that most of the explanations that use it will be clear to those who don't read Ecrits for kicks. Other chapters provide encounters with Catullus, Propertius, the idea of Gallus, and Ovid.The complexity of elegy Paul Allen Miller puts on glorious display. The argument that the ideologically split selves of poets in an uncertain age begat poems offering politically prismatic effects seems remotely analogous to Glenn Most's essay elsewhere on the rage for poetic dismemberment during the reign of Nero, in the sense that both authors consider the poets concerned to be keenly aware of the political and cultural trends of the age. The book was invigorating and frustrating for this reader, but on such an exciting topic the many hits may outnumber the misses. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews� Was this review helpful to you?�Yes No Report abuse | PermalinkComment�Comment
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