Title: The I as the Eye: on Poetics of Ruins in I. Brodsky’s essay Homage to Marcus Aurelius
Abstract:The main aim of this chapter is to offer a possible interpretation of the meanings attached to the ruins as both the image and the metaphor in Brodsky’s essays, or, to be more precise, in “Homage to M...The main aim of this chapter is to offer a possible interpretation of the meanings attached to the ruins as both the image and the metaphor in Brodsky’s essays, or, to be more precise, in “Homage to Marcus Aurelius” (1994), an essay that sets its narrative world in the ruined world that surrounds the narrator, elicits an ambivalent sense of time, and provokes complex thoughts of history as an eternal cycle and dialectic process. Departing from the premises that ruins emancipate us from social constraints, free senses, and desires, enable introspection, and foster creativity, I expand the well-established thesis according to which Brodsky’s writings are structured on an image of time as irretrievability and irreclaimability, which, in his writings, reverberates and re-creates an experience of continuous failures to discipline the memory, thus making any return impossible. Moreover, my aim is to show that the approach to Brodsky’s essays from the perspective of an analysis of ruins can offer us much more: for example, it can offer valuable insights into his understanding of the agency of the authorial modernist voice in literature. Where, in a work of art, is the writer’s voice located? What does it mean to see and to write, and what does it mean to read? What role, in this process, is assigned to tradition, “eternal values,” and cultural heritage?Read More