The Primacy of Vision in Virgil's AeneidOne of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Working from the theories of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smith characterizes Aeneas as a voyant-visible, a person who both sees and is seen and who approaches the world through the faculty of vision. Engaging in close readings of key episodes throughout the poem, Smith shows how Aeneas repeatedly acts on what he sees rather than what he hears. Smith views Aeneas' final act of slaying Turnus, a character associated with the power of oratory, as the victory of vision over rhetoric, a triumph that reflects the ascendancy of visual symbols within Augustan society. Smith's new interpretation of the predominance of vision in the Aeneid makes it plain that Virgil's epic contributes to a new visual culture and a new mythology of Imperial Rome. |
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... final encounter therefore brings the episode to a close , re- vealing , in a final rendezvous of this kind , the ineffectiveness of speech 63 and the lasting impression of a final glance . Aeneas only discovers reports of Dido's death ...
... final scene , he places empha- sis on Turnus ' words.149 Turnus tenders , in his final breaths , the last occur- rence of orare in the poem ( 933 ) . The oral supplication that characterizes Tur- nus ' final moments is the very sort of ...
... final scene , the child of Troy will resist words but prevail . 37. Nicholas Horsfall ( Virgil , Aeneid 7 : A Commentary [ Leiden , 2000 ] , ad loc . ) states that " this is a rare , yet insignificant name . " 38. Although the meaning ...
Contents
CHAPTER 2 | 22 |
Vision Past and Future | 60 |
Love Vision and Destiny | 97 |
Copyright | |
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