Archaic Figure Research Articles

Haec nemora indigenae Fauni nymphaeque tenebant (En. VIII, 314) : Le chant VIII de l’Énéide comme archéologie poétique de l’épopée

If antiquarianism of Aeneid VIII emphasized political, religious and folkloric stakes of the primordia Vrbis, Virgil also deals with a poetic archeology. He first summarizes, in a generic approach, the Homeric, Alexandrian and Latin stages of a literary history of the epic, particularly noticeable in the “ proem in the middle” (En. VII, 37-44) and in the ekphrasis of Aeneas’ Shield (En. VIII, 626-731). Then he underscores, in a ‘ poietic’ stake, his conception of uates (En. VII, 41 ; VIII, 627), through the archaic figure of Faunus / the Fauni (En. VIII, 314). Finally, a history of the major stages of the dactylic hexameter constitutes a metric approach in this archeology, inviting us to consider a bucolic color of Aeneid VIII.

The shadow of the bear

AbstractNew approaches built over the past ten years make it possible to address several long-standing questions regardingGuiron le Courtois. In particular, these studies illuminate ambiguities related to the literary origins of the protagonist and of his family. Guiron’s lineage as well as that of Galeholt le Brun, his mentor, include powerful individuals; and yet these strong characters remain peripheral, seldom crossing into the orbit of the Arthurian court. Of their lives only certain segments are known, and these alternate with imprisonment and incognito chivalric adventures. TheRoman de Guiron, the core narrative of the cycle, most likely drew the protagonist’s name from the tradition of Arthurianlaisbut reinvented from scratch his chivalric biography, playing on the ambiguity of the relations between Guiron’s family and the Bruns, the family of Galeholt. One mirrors the other, and both seem to converge towards the archaic figures of the giant and the bear, while the plot unfolds in an unusual retro-chronology, drawing the reader’s sight to their origins.

À Chypre, Aphrodite "s’est brisée en mille morceaux" : Fragments d’une écriture poétique redéfinie et mémoire "méthistorique"1

Thus poetry is something more philosophical and higher than history; for poetry speaks rather of generalities and the history of particular details”. These words of Aristotle are fully relevant to the case of Cyprus whose history would have been better illuminated by its poets; Costas Montis, Claire Angelides, Kyriakos Charalambides, Pantelis Michanikos, and others, have become witnesses, those who wipe away the tears of the people. Their creative journey follows the flow of the contemporary history of the country, which is divided into two periods: a) that of the 1955-1959 struggles against the British Empire and b) the one marked by the brutal invasion of the Turks in 1974 which entailed the geopolitical division of the island. The poetic writing of the first period, studied extensively and published in various anthologies, extols the endurance of the people and the heroism of young fighters. In that of the second period, which will be the object of our study here, the poet, in an effort to exorcise evil spirit and injustice, re-experiences the trauma of being uprooted and of mourning all that has been lost; wandering between myth and reality, truth and fiction, he/she distils history so as to redefine poetic art and thus weave his/her own myth. In order to follow the poetic journey of contemporary Cypriot Greeks, we have borrowed extracts from their most representative works: (i) Closed Doors by Costas Montis, which turns out to be a response to Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, (ii) Methistoria by Kyriakos Charalambides, for whom tragedy alone reveals to us the cosmos of our own existence, (iii) Deposition by Pantelis Michanikos, where the archaic figure of Onesilus prevails, (iv) Breezes of Salamis by Claire Angelides who expresses her nostalgia for the past and her fervent hope to regain Salamis.

Walter Benjamin e o contador de histórias: (re)fundação do conto como gênero crítico

Contemporâneo de Dostoievski e de Tolstoi, Nicolai Leskov viveu e escreveu na época de apogeu do romance russo do século XIX. Entretanto, ao caracterizá-lo, logo nas primeiras linhas de seu célebre ensaio de 1936, Walter Benjamin o assimila à figura arcaica do contador de histórias, cujas origens pré-modernas se enraízam na tradição oral, na transmissibilidade da experiência de vida (Erfahrung), a qual estaria irremediavelmente perdida no mundo moderno. Assim, ele situa Leskov num passado anterior ao da modernidade que, no século XIX, encontra sua expressão literária no romance burguês. O anacronismo não é arbitrário: o contista russo se serve, de fato, de formas narrativas tradicionais que se alimentam de um farto material popular, e em particular da tipologia do conto de fadas. Entretanto, a partir da leitura de seus contos, Benjamin propõe a fundação de um novo gênero, radicalmente moderno, sobre as ruínas da arte de contar histórias. Para isto, ele explora e potencializa a produtividade reflexiva instaurada pela narrativa tradicional não apenas teoricamente, num ensaio crítico, mas também numa instigante produção ficcional. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a934.

Преславизмы в апокрифических Вопросах апостола "Варфоломея"

Paper deals with the lexical analysis of the Old Church Slavonic version of the Apocryphal Questions of Bartholomew, a literary monument written most likely in Greek in the 3rd century. The analysis shows that the Slavonic version contains not only lexical elements typical for the Preslav redaction, but also some archaic figures. This leads to the conclusion, that the primal Old Church Slavonic translation may be made in Bulgaria in the 10th century. There are two possibilities of a more exact dating. The text may have been translated in the early 10th century when the lexical elements of the Preslav redaction weren’t strictly used yet and still there occurred many archaic figures. The second possibility is that the translation was made later in the 10th century in one of the distant centers of the Preslav literary school, in which a specific tradition in using Preslav and archaic lexical elements was held. However, a further lexical and language analysis is needed for the confirmation of the stated dating.

Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explores the possibilities for decolonization through an analysis of the “multicultural” state as an ongoing practice of coloniality that recognizes and incorporates indigenous people but only as static, archaic figures defined by a continuous relationship to an idealized past. As Cusicanqui demonstrates, this truncated recognition subordinates indigenous people, depriving them of their contemporaneity, complexity, and dynamism and, therefore, of their potential to challenge the given order. Coloniality and its relations of domination, she claims, are also reproduced in the knowledge production of academic scholars of decoloniality, primarily from the global North. These academics, she argues, appropriate the language and ideas of indigenous scholars without grappling with the relations of force that define their relationships to them, thus decontextualizing and depoliticizing these concepts and marginalizing indigenous scholars from their own debates. Counterposing the Aymara concept of ch'ixi—a parallel coexistence of difference—to multiculturalism and hybridity, which incorporates and flattens or distorts difference, Cusicanqui shows that decolonization must be not only a discourse but also an affirmative practice.

Agamben, Kristeva, and the Language of the Sacred

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben outlines a theory of biopower that purports to extend and correct Michel Foucault's writings in first volume of The History of Sexuality. Where Foucault suggests that biopower fosters or disallows it to point of death, Agamben claims that biopower maintains a hidden and violent solidarity with sovereign power; biopower, as he puts it, makes survive. Agamben's titular figure symbolizes rethinking of sacred involved in this provocative thesis. An archaic figure of Roman law, homo sacer is that sacred man whose killing constitutes neither murder nor sacrifice, who lives beyond reach of both human and divine law. Included in juridico-political order by being excluded from it, this obscure vulnerable figure is, for Agamben, original meaning of sacred and original element of politics; by marking life's radical and unambiguous exposure to law's violence, homo sacer implies that Western politics has always been a biopolitics. Framed by Agamben's account of biopower, homo sacer challenges a long tradition that defines sacred through its apparently ambiguous or ambivalent character. Since late nineteenth century, and especially in anthropological, psychoanalytic and linguistic texts, theory of ambivalence of sacred has focused on term's contradictory associations; sacer can mean both sacred or cursed, sacred objects are objects of both veneration and fear, sacred persons cannot [be] touched without dirtying oneself or without dirtying.1 If ambivalence appears a persistent characteristic of sacred, it nevertheless does little to elucidate - and in fact occludes - figure of homo sacer. A psychologization of religious experience, ambivalence fails to explain why divine law does not recognize homo sacer, why he is excluded from sacrifice.2 While thinkers from Durkheim to Freud to Rene Girard assume that ambivalence is proper to sacred and obscure its political character, Agamben exposes a necessary, intimate and violent link between sacred and sovereign, a link that might hide within but still functions through scientific mythologemes.3 Working in a psychoanalytic lineage, Julia Kristeva's theory of sacred extends Agamben's concern with violent intersection of power and life; as Kristeva might revise it, contemporary power - increasingly chaotic, normalizing and empty- makes [the psyche] survive. In terms that resonate with Agamben's account of biopolitics, Kristeva writes that today a new version of erects [itself] as supreme value and threatens to destroy after having devalued question of its meaning.4 For Kristeva, however, soft totalitarianism represents a danger to sacred (understood as intersection of and meaning) rather than an expansion of sacred (in which exception becomes rule). On her reading, a politics of itself threatens sacred experience of meaning to act of giving that is life and imperils sacred passage between the animalistic and verbal, sensible and nameable.5 To be sure, Kristeva's distance from Agamben vis-a-vis sacred suggests that she participates in an economy of ambivalence and sacrifice, especially in her association of sacred and the abject. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva posits as an essential part of sacred passage of symbolic development. In abjection, child renders mother's body disgusting or revolting in order to facilitate maternal sacrifice; as something rejected from which one does not part, abject symbolizes child's ambivalent relationship to mother. Despite Agamben's warnings about ambivalence, notion of abjection appears dedicated towards exposing rather than obscuring political violence.6 In Kristevan text, abjection marks failure of soft totalitarianism to support development of symbolic bonds; disempowered and disconnected, sacred gives way to abject as subjects re-invoke violent processes of identity differentiation against vulnerable populations. …

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

Translating Gjergj Fishta's epic masterpiece, Lahuta e Malcis, into English as The Highland Lute

The Highland Lute, the Albanian national epic poem, contains 15,613 lines. It mirrors Albania’s difficult struggle for freedom and independence which was finally achieved in 1912. It was important for Robert Elsie and I to achieve an atmosphere similar to that of other important European epics such as Beowulf (England), The Kalevala (Finland), and the grand medieval poems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries such as The Song of Roland (France), Nibelungenlied (Germany), and Poem of the Cid (Spain). Rhythmically, The Highland Lute is very much like the American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, Hiawatha, parts of which I loved to recite as a young girl. 
 
 Our task with translating The Highland Lute into English has been to make the language relevant and understandable for the modern reader while still retaining its colloquial, archaic, majestic, and heroic feel which gives a strong sense of the past. Quite a challenge! We translated many expressions unique to Gheg, and did our best to describe symbols of Albanian mythology and legend such as oras (female spirits), zanas (protective mountain spirits), draguas (semi-human figures with supernatural powers), shtrigas (witches), lugats (vampires), and kulshedras (seven-headed dragon-like creatures). We kept the octosyllabic rhythm consistent throughout, and we captured the qualities common to all epics: alliteration, assonance, repetition, hyperbole, metaphor, archaic figures of speech, concrete descriptions, colour, drama, passion, a range of emotions, intensity, sensuality, lots of action, rhyme where possible, and an exalted, dignified tone.

Translating Gjergj Fishta's Epic Masterpiece Lahuta E Malcis into English as The Highland Lute

(2008). Translating Gjergj Fishta's Epic Masterpiece Lahuta E Malcis into English as The Highland Lute. Translation Review: Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 68-71.

On Necklaces

On Necklaces Emily R. Grosholz (bio) This essay is dedicated to Roald Hoffmann, who has brought me back beads from Calcutta, Bangkok, Singapore, Madagascar via Tucson, Arizona, and the Atacama Desert in Chile. Anthropology What is the charm of necklaces? Why would anyone put something extra around their neck and then invest it with special significance? A necklace doesn't afford warmth in cold weather, like a scarf, or protection in combat, like chain mail; it only decorates. We might say, it borrows meaning from what it surrounds and sets off, the head with its supremely important material contents, and the face, that register of the soul. When photographers discuss the way in which a photograph reduces the reality it represents, they mention not only the passage from three dimensions to two, but also the selection of a point de vue that favors the top of the body rather than the bottom, and the front rather than the back. The face is the jewel in the crown of the body, and so we give it a setting. When people are intensely concerned with something that is obviously impractical, anthropologists take note, for lovely useless things often express archaic structures in the human soul. Fireplaces, for example, have little reason to exist in contemporary American houses already heated by gas and electricity, yet most people want one and it is still the focus of the living room. This desire testifies, I think, to the hundreds of thousands of years during which we Homo sapiens huddled around a cave fire. We watch ourselves, rather anxiously, vanish backward down those long temporal corridors, as my daughter gazes at her infinitely multiplied small self in the mutually opposed mirrors of the beauty salon, and wonders, is it me? Our fireplaces and necklaces and tombstones say it is, they are. So we have the corporeal-cultural custom of wearing something around our necks, useless except for the emphasis or commentary it provides. A necklace is very meta. A friend of mine in Paris, Lucie Vines, learning of my newly acquired fascination with bead craft, brought out two necklaces that she had made from objects purchased over a period of decades in the antiquarian shops of Paris. The first was a necklace made entirely of Neolithic beads, great over-sized, roundly geometrical, roughly granitic [End Page 182] things. Taken together, they were gorgeous and not a little disturbing, for they were the literal embodiment of the archaic figure of the necklace. So too the second, composed entirely of Egyptian amulets and scarabs, each two or three thousand years old. And then she emptied a box of African trade beads that she'd been saving up, and let me take my pick of them to celebrate my unwonted excursion into color and form. (She's an artist.) In three or four different experiments, I mixed them up with faux and vrai Murano millefiore beads; amber, red, and blue glass lozenges; heavy round dark crushed-glass-coated oversized beads; green aventurine beads from a garage sale; silver filigree beads from an antiques barn near Lancaster; and coral beads from the Philippines, coated in shellac, with the grain and striation of little apples. In American culture, an interest in necklaces seems to be rather gender specific. Many men to whom I mention the enterprise feign polite interest and then change the subject, though I know some who admire, construct, and wear necklaces, including the distinguished scientist and poet to whom this essay is dedicated. Most women, by contrast, become mildly to wildly enthusiastic. A doctor in Blois brought out her entire collection of costume jewelry for me, exhibited the most splendid pieces with an account of where and when they were purchased, and then explained them all with the help of a large glossy book on the history of costume jewelry, with dozens of pictures. A former student who had moved to California mailed me six plastic boxes full of beads gleaned from a warehouse managed by an eccentric friend who just likes to amass: a trove of freshwater pearls I had to detach one by one from their settings; a feature bead painted with a naked lady; crystal...

The Primitive in Othello:


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Previous Jungian criticism of Othello overlooks the primitive, treats it as an obvious premise, or does not consider it in the context of Jung’s extensive and widely varied statements on the subject. This essay deepens the archetypal approach by discussing the play in terms of the primitive mentality that ultimately thwarts Othello’s individuation. When Jung’s racist rhetoric is subjected to postcolonial critique, what emerges is the helpful concept of the psychologically archaic—areas of the psyche that are less conscious and less differentiated. A post-Jungian emphasis on the archaic then illuminates Desdemona’s attraction to the Moor; war, fetishism, and the supernatural; and the signifying process surrounding the handkerchief. In addition, Jung’s “four stages of eroticism” (feminine archetypes) enhance the significance of the sibyl, an archaic figure with civilizing influence. Shakespeare’s use of the primitive culminates in Othello’s final comparison of himself to two primitives (Indian and Turk), and he dies a broken man—aware that projection has caused his downfall.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Le jour où Abraham céda sur sa foi. Lecture psycho-anthropologique de Genèse 22

The biblical story of the binding of Isaac raises a question about the meaning of the paternal function. On the basis of the brief seminar of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan about the Names of the Father and of his interpretation of the figure of Abraham in Genesis 22, Jean-Daniel Causse points out the anthropological and theological issues of a symbolical fatherhood that structures an alliance only by the link of the word. He shows notably the ongoing interest of Abraham who must consecrate ritually the death of an archaic figure, which is both ancestor and god, in order that his own fatherhood not dominate Isaac but offer a new history to a son promised to the future.

The Berekhat Ram figurine: a late Acheulian carving from the Middle East

The human capacity for recognizing categorical forms and their defining characterstics extends to a recognition of natural forms and shapes that may suggest these categories. The issue is raised below by the analysis of an archaic figure from the Levant in which a natural form was apparently intentionally modified to produce an enhanced human image.

Dimension and Authority

DIMENSION AND AUTHORITY / Rodney Jones Archaic Figure, by Amy Clampitt, Knopf. $8.95 paper. Lovesick, by Gerald Stern, Harper & Row. $9.95 paper. Flesh and Blood, by C. K. Williams, Farrar/Straus/Giroux. $12.95 cloth. The Sunset Maker, by Donald Justice, Atheneum. $8.95 paper. ANY ATTEMPT TO COMPARE POETS as accomplished as Amy Clampitt, Gerald Stern, C. K. Williams, and Donald Justice poses an ethical problem, for each has created work that demands a distinctive reading. It would be absurd to measure Justice, for instance, by Clampitt, or Stern by WilUams. Nor is there space here to link the poets by common historical affiliations. Certainly, Justice and Clampitt are heirs of Wallace Stevens, just as Stern and Williams are heirs of William Carlos Williams, but the Stevens modes that Justice and Clampitt employ are not the same, and Stern and Williams have learned different lessons from Dr. Williams. Nevertheless, I would like to approach these new books by discussing them within the framework of a common issue: how a poet of the first order achieves, in our time, a dimension sufficient to make poetry that will matter. Two recent essays, Donald Hall's "Poetry and Ambition" and Terence Des Pres' "Self/Landscape/Grid," have questioned the scope of contemporary poetry. Hall complains of a "modesty of ambition"; Des Pres laments the failure of poets to deal with large social issues such as nuclear proliferation. And whUe Hall is primarily concerned with the poet's responsibility to poetry, and Des Pres with the poet's responsibility to society, both specify a poetry that fails in conception more than in craft. For me, however, the more frightening indictment is that much of our poetry honors an imaginative and musical focus of such narrow range that the resultant poetry is, almost by default, minor. As a seventy-five year old Wallace Stevens said, "we can never have great poetry unless we believe that poetry serves great ends. We must recognize this from the beginning so that it will affect everything that we do. Our belief in the greatness of poetry is a vital part of its greatness, an implicit part of the belief of others in its greatness." And yet if we take Stevens' maxim seriously, then we must distinguish between the belief in poetry and the belief in the ends that poetry serves. The desire to create an original and compelling musical phrase, for instance, differs considerably from Milton's ambition to "justify God's ways to man." But if the latter strikes some 262 · The Missouri Review as more laudable, to others it will seem inconsistent with the temper of an age in which icons have been reduced to artifacts, and kings and queens to emblems of defunct monarchies. This is not to say that the icons have been completely overturned; one has only to read Seamus Heaney's "Station Island" or Derek Walcott's "The Spoiler's Return" to feel the power—in the old sense of "dominance," of speaking from the other side—that these artifacts contain. But the more common concerns of poems of the last thirty years have not been social, political, or religious so much as refinements of individual human consciousness, the major consequence, perhaps, of imagisme. Clampitt, Stern, WUUams, and Justice, while they are each interested in such refinements, go far beyond the history-and-abstractionpurged consciousness of so many of the heirs of imagisme. Though Williams, for example, seems to be a poet of the immediate moment, he elaborates, in that brief frame, a historical dimension which extends our notion of what a moment can contain, as in this ninth section of "La Petit Salvie": How ambiguous the triumphs of our time, the releasing of the intellect from myth and magic. We've gained much, we think, from having torn away corrupted modes of aggrandizement and giantism, those infected and infecting errors that so long held sway and so bloated our complacencies that we would willingly inflict even on our own flesh the crippling implications of our metaphysic. Clearly, this is poetry that aspires to breadth. The same might be said of Justice's "St. Michael's Cemetery, Charleston." One may depend on...

The Rescue of the Chinese Rhinoceros

Some twenty-four years ago there was carried on a high and formidable argument between two Professors of Chinese concerning the rhinoceros and his Chinese name. In the end each contestant remained, as is usual in such literary warfare or “incidents”, of the same opinion still, while the third parties to the dispute finding their minds in some confusion on the matter, concluded that either Professor A was in the right, or else, perhaps, it was Professor B. And so the question rested for some years, and sleeping dogs were allowed to lie. But in due course An Yang in the Province of Honan surrendered its long hidden store of bone and tortoise-shell, inscribed with archaic characters. And on the discoveries and problems thus presented we have been browsing ever since. Among these novel forms are two, each of which is partly one and partly the other. Discoveries, because though written forms do exist, these do not descend from the archaic figures under discussion. Problems, because the equation of certain bone pictures with the exact identity of the quadrupeds indicated in the inscriptions, has hitherto been disputed or equivocal. The bone figures of both these novelties display beasts of large bulk, both have horns, and both are furnished with tails, carefully marked by trifid tufts by the scribe. In the recording entries both follow a word chu, meaning to chase, and those who hunted the quarry were the Yin Sovereigns of the time. Where then is the difficulty in identifying the particular species of Big Game hunted by the sporting rulers of the Shang-Yin line ? Briefly, the horns in each case have been a dilemma hindering full assurance of our conclusions

Three Bronze Figures from Asia Minor

This little archaic figure (Figs) I purchased in 1901 at Vathy in Samos, and with it a fine bronze sword, of which hereafter. The peasant who sold it to the Samian from whom I got it was reported to have said that they were discovered together at the village of Castania near Carlovasi. It is undoubtedly an early example of Greek figure-casting. The figure itself is four inches high, but there are two projections from the soles of the feet, making it four-and-a-half inches high over all. These projections are intentionally formed, to fix the figure upright on its base. The figure stands rigidly upright, with feet apart and arms detached from the body at the elbow and raised rather higher than the horizontal line. The figure would be absolutely symmetrical about its middle plane if it were not for the hands, of which the right is open with the palm turned to the figure's own left, while the left hand is closed and perforated as if to grasp something. The lower part of the body is without modelling and resembles a rounded board or a flattened bolster. There is no attempt to model the bosom. The face itself is long, with rather wide and high cheekbones: the eyes are wide and staring as in most very early Greek work: the hair lies low on the forehead. The mouth, though fairly well marked, wears no smile; on the contrary, the lower lip is thrust forward a little. Neither fingers nor toes are marked with any certainty.