Browsing by Author "Slabbert, Talitha"
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- ItemPoetics of passage in modernist reconfigurations of Odysseus(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Slabbert, Talitha; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: While the prevalence of the figure of Odysseus in Western literature has been much studied, insufficient attention has been paid to its associations with epistemology, and to the semiotic potential of the navigator-hero’s contest with the sea in figuring the relation between the episteme and the world it seeks to know. This thesis draws on Hans Blumenberg’s notion of “absolute metaphor” and Giambattista Vico’s notion of “poetic wisdom” to argue that Odysseus – in his ineluctable association with the image of the sea – serves, for modernist authors, as a means through which to represent the uncertain and difficult movement of existence and interpretation in the early 20th century, and that it becomes, for certain authors, an exceptionally intelligible means through which to figure their own hermeneutic ventures. The primary examples of this self-implicated hermeneutics studied in this thesis are Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and on James Joyce’s Ulysses, but, in order to contextualise these authors’ respective reconfigurations of the navigator-hero, I commence with a survey of some of the most influential reconfigurations of Odysseus that lead up to the 20th century, and of the disparate inflections given to the figure according to the epistemological attitudes of different authors and of their various historical contexts. This groundwork includes a consideration of the epistemological specificities of the 19th century, as the matrix from which the self-conscious hermeneutics of modernist literature would emerge. This project ultimately aims to lead to a more nuanced understanding of the way in which the figure of Odysseus operates within literature, and to an appreciation of the protean semiotic resources which it presents to authors, given its long history and its association with the similarly resonant image of the sea. In this thesis, I go on to reconsider Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential – but potentially reductive, if taken as absolute – claim that Odysseus is essentially a literary instantiation of Enlightenment reason on its trajectory towards a final disenchantment of the world. Instead, it is the argument of this thesis that the figure tends to exceed the specific configurations it is given, subtly destabilising – and potentially enriching – authors’ intended meanings through the inflections and the echoes of the multiple other configurations associated with it. As such, the figure operates in the milieu between determinate meaning and meaninglessness, providing authors with a provisional vehicle for their hermeneutics, a sort of poetics of passage through which to navigate an ‘oceanic’ and unhomely modernity.