Terence’s Eunuchus

Suetonius (Vita Terenti 3) asserts that Eunuchus was Terence’s most commercially successful play. While we cannot confirm this claim, Eunuchus (as all Terence’s plays) enjoyed continuous readership after performances of it ceased in antiquity, was often cited by ancient writers and grammarians, and received a commentary in the 4th century ce. While Eunuchus is not without its critics—some have found fault with its dramatic structure and the ethics of its finale, to say nothing of its unique (in New Comedy) foregrounding of violent rape—it has generated enormous interest in both medieval and modern cultures, including numerous commentaries and translations. Eunuch’s unusual deception-plot, that is, the impulsive Chaerea’s costuming as a eunuch to sexually overpower Pamphila, no doubt accounts for much of the attention the play has attracted. For scholars of gender and sexuality, Eunuch invites interrogation of Roman attitudes toward sexual violence, norms of masculinity, and constructions of gender, as well as of the sexually ambiguous figure of the eunuch in this dramatic and cultural context. Eunuch’s prologue has also captivated scholars of Roman comedy and literary history more generally, as it so clearly articulates recurring concerns of Terence’s characteristically metadramatic prologues: Terence’s adaptation of both his Greek and Latin sources, including charges of “contamination” and “plagiarism,” and the broader challenges of finding novelty within circumscribed comic tradition (for Terence’s “anxiety of influence” see esp. Eun. 35–43). Some scholarship has been conducted on linguistic differentiation among Eunuch’s characters, and it is hoped that burgeoning sociolinguistic work on Plautine Latin will continue to be extended to Terence. Recent criticism has largely focused on aspects of Eunuch’s performance, both on the micro-level of costumes, stage movements, and musicality, and more broadly on the play’s pervasive metatheatricality.

The anxiety of influence: una revisión de la poética de Luis Cernuda a través del mito de Narciso

Este trabajo se propone llevar a cabo un recorrido por la presencia de la historia de Narciso en la obra de Luis Cernuda, permitiendo apreciar la evolución y el tratamiento que el autor sevillano confiere al mito, todo ello desde una dimensión diacrónica, a la luz de la revisión del concepto de tradición, pero partiendo de las teorías de H. Bloom acerca de la noción anxiety of influence, junto con las ideas de T. S. Eliot contenidas en los ensayos «The Tradition and the Individual Talent» y «What Is a Classic?» y las de E. Said, de forma complementaria, en relación al concepto de admiration for predecesors.

The Evils of Supersessionism

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that “strong poets make . . . [poetic] history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.” I apply Bloom’s literary theory, mutatis mutandis, to religious history and theology. Even the other monotheistic Abrahamic faiths—Christianity and Islam—resent their dependency on Hebrew Scripture and tradition and aim to make room for themselves by misreading the Jews and Judaism. Christians would define themselves by writing a “New Testament” that supplants the “Old,” even as Muslims would produce a “Final Testament” that supersedes all previous. Bloom describes “six revisionary ratios” by which strong poets would distinguish themselves from their predecessors. My task is to adapt these conventions and to demonstrate that they have more than aesthetic/literary import. Christian and Islamic ethics and theology, and even Nazism as a pagan counter, can plausibly be seen to suffer from the anxiety of influence and to seek to liberate themselves from their Jewish paternity by literal and figurative patricide.

Mapping the journey: A study of maturing femininity in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

Opposed to the anxiety of influence supposedly suffered by male writers with regard to their predecessors, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) propounded the concept of anxiety of authorship to hold true for female writers. According to this theory, women joined in a sorority with their literary foremothers in their efforts to prove their worthiness in taking up the male vocation of writing. In Alice Munro’s short story collection Lives of Girls and Women, the mother is ever-present in her daughter’s mind, and their relationship is instrumental in her maturation as a woman and a writer. In this paper, the relationship between the two women is explained in terms of some of the notions put forth in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, namely the angel/monster dichotomy, the anxiety of authorship, female double consciousness, infection in the sentence, and the parable of the cave. Using these concepts, it is aimed to show that although these notions were proposed as a model for 19th century woman writers, the modern-day Del is yet to come to terms with the anxiety of authorship and its accompanying problems.

Between Poetic Voice and Silence: Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Metapoetics and Emily Dickinson’s Legacy

The article is a comparative study of the ways in which two American modernist poets bound by a literary and human connection, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, dealt with Emily Dickinson’s legacy in their own works. My study is an attempt to place Crane within the legacy of the American Renaissance as represented not by Walt Whitman, with whom he is customarily associated, but by Dickinson, and to examine the special place she holds in Crane’s poetry and in his thinking about poetry and the world at large. Crane’s poetic take on the Amherst poet is set against and complemented by his friend Yvor Winters’s ambiguous relationship with Dickinson’s heritage: troubled by an anxiety of influence, Winters, the poet-critic, vacillates between his reverence for the female poet and his skepticism about certain aspects of her œuvre. In the close readings of the poems in question undertaken in my study, the focus is on their metapoetic dimension. Particular emphasis is laid on the dialectics of silence, which plays a key role in both Crane’s and Winters’s works under discussion, as well as on the related themes of blankness and absence, poetic plenitude and perfection. Attention is also given to the problematics of death, time and timelessness. While Winters concentrates mostly on metapoetics in his exploration of the Dickinsonian tradition, Crane goes further, considering the fate of female artists and gender issues, thereby transcending poetic self-reflexiveness and addressing farther-reaching community concerns, with particular emphasis on anti-patriarchal and feminist ones.

Ángeles y demonios en «canto a Teresa»

En «Canto a Teresa» y El diablo mundo (del que constituye una sección importante), igual que en algunos otros poemas suyos, Espronceda expresa su «titánico» desafío a los poderes y los mores de la tierra y del cielo. Desarrolla muchas imágenes mixtas de ángeles y demonios para caracterizar sus relaciones con Teresa Mancha, igual que para explorar su propio carácter como hombre y como poeta. Participa así en una larga tradición de pintar a la mujer como ángel y demonio, la que ganó un especial valor corriente en su propio siglo. En efecto, Espronceda intenta efectuar un «marriage of heaven and hell», al estilo de Blake, en su poesía. Además, el poeta se refiere a unos versículos del capítulo 14 del Libro de Isaías, los que tratan de Lucifer y su caída. Ironiza sobremanera el texto de la sagrada escritura, para desarrollar sus retratos de Teresa y de sí mismo con (y sin) ella. En tales alusiones Espronceda soempre revela su ambivalencia y su «anxiety of influence» no resueltas, tanto en lo estético como en lo ético.