Virgil's Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the AeneidVirgil's Aeneid invites its reader to identify with the Roman nation whose origins and destiny it celebrates. But, as J. D. Reed argues in Virgil's Gaze, the great Roman epic satisfies this identification only indirectly--if at all. In retelling the story of Aeneas' foundational journey from Troy to Italy, Virgil defines Roman national identity only provisionally, through oppositions to other ethnic identities--especially Trojan, Carthaginian, Italian, and Greek--oppositions that shift with the shifting perspective of the narrative. Roman identity emerges as multivalent and constantly changing rather than unitary and stable. The Roman self that the poem gives us is capacious--adaptable to a universal nationality, potentially an imperial force--but empty at its heart. However, the incongruities that produce this emptiness are also what make the Aeneid endlessly readable, since they forestall a single perspective and a single notion of the Roman. |
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... suggest self-defining contrasts with other nations (nations over which the Romans had gained dominion); an origin in the world of Greek mythology, but in a city opposed to the Greeks, makes the mediation of Hellenism in any such account ...
... suggests certain oppositional constructions of gender, but in the desirous viewer (whether conceived as narrator, character, or reader), we can explore the way that alterity can posit a lack, a need, even an urge to assimilate one's ...
... suggest an approach (at least where national identity is concerned) to the ambiguity that critics of the past half-century have found to be of especial interpretive interest in the poem: Roman identity is an ambiguous figure, a problêma ...
... suggest, prevent that identity from ever being fixed or independent of the multiple oppositions that inhere among its components. Beyond the actual, narrated movements of the poem's persons we have the symbolic ethnic identifications ...
... suggests the boundary line between the poem's implied self and the nations of the eastern Mediterranean (“barbarian” nations, according to the Hellenocentric discourse that Romans adopted for certain purposes—but potentially, as seen ...
Contents
1 | |
Euryalus | 16 |
Turnus | 44 |
Dido | 73 |
Andromache | 101 |
Ancient Cities | 129 |
Marcellus | 148 |
Aeneas | 173 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 203 |
INDEX OF TEXTS CITED | 211 |
GENERAL INDEX | 223 |