Abstract: Epic Afterlives: Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva takes as
its starting point the repetition within the history of classical
epic poetry of the hero's journey to the underworld, asking how
this scene functions in each poem in which it appears, and how it
functions within the poetic tradition. I argue that each poetic
representation of the underworld, which necessarily involves a
conception of the afterlife, works within the poem to fulfill
simultaneous wishes to revive and revisit the past, and to gain
knowledge of the future. The Introduction to Epic Afterlives
examines the poetic constructions of the topographies and
temporalities of underworld and afterlife in the Odyssey, in
Virgil's Aeneid, and in Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on the
psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and the works of Walter
Benjamin, focusing particularly on those moments when it seems that
past, present and future are strung together, as Freud says, on
the thread of the wish that runs through them. The dissertation
argues that, following the violent advent of modernity which
renders the epic an essentially dead form, the wishes, desires,
or drives that once found expression in those epic underworlds live
out linguistic afterlives, however fragmentary or phantasmal, in
other literary forms, and in particular in lyric poetry. The
following chapters consider the poetry of Charles Baudelaire as it
confronts a change in the structure of experience in 19th century
Paris which makes it increasingly difficult for the poet to imagine
any kind of afterlife at all, and the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva,
who responded to the terrible difficulties of life in, or in exile
from, Soviet Russia by envisioning, with ever-increasing detail, a
refuge for herself and for all poets in an
other-world.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot