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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... seen, I have adopted for them the term voyant-visible, which Merleau-Ponty uses to describe the human being who embraces life's challenges visually and visibly. 4 the primacy of vision in virgil's Aeneid.
... voyant-visible is the centerpiece of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and is particularly applicable to the central figure ... voyant-visible; this is the person who, almost instinctively, makes decisions based on what he sees. This perception ...
... visible himself. His perceptibility defines the voyant-visible as an actor who is identified as such. I will employ Merleau-Ponty's voyant-visible in two ways. First, I will conceptualize, as an operating principle, the poet as a kind ...
... voyant-visible to act appropriately in his environment.This proper action is borne out of decision-making based on what is seen and therefore what is real to the viewer, not a ''God's-eye view'' but a human view on the human plane. I do ...
... voyant-visible: he is in the world as see-er and as one held up as an icon in the midst of those with whom he interacts. He is a participant in and an engager of his surroundings, not existential or removed from them. Such an ''earthy ...
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 |