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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... Merleau-Ponty to Virgil's principal character, Aeneas.25 My use of Merleau-Ponty is not meant to introduce a tight phenomenological approach to reading. Others such as Gadamer and Ingarden26 have done this successfully, within the ...
... Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and is particularly applicable to the central figure of Virgil's narrative, Aeneas. theory Merleau-Ponty developed his theories about phenomenology in response to a tradition of phenomenological debate that ...
... Merleau-Ponty's voyant-visible in two ways. First, I will conceptualize, as an operating principle, the poet as a kind of voyant-visible, an artist not wholly removed from the work he creates yet necessarily distinct from his characters ...
Riggs Alden Smith. Merleau-Ponty's voyant-visible is connected to other living beings, forming a mutual relationship in which each person becomes fully understood only in relation to others.49 Proper vision, which defines that ...
... Merleau-Ponty noted, ''The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and ... Merleau-Ponty's voyant-visible: he is in the world as see-er and as one held up as an icon in the midst of those with ...
Contents
1 | |
Ruse and Revelation Visions of the Divine and the Telos of Narrative | 24 |
Vision Past and Future | 60 |
Hic amor Love Vision and Destiny | 97 |
Vidi Vici Visions Victory and the Telos of Narrative | 128 |
Conclusion Ante ora parentum | 176 |
Notes | 183 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Subject Index | 237 |
Index Locorum | 247 |