Poeta Doctus Research Articles

Vico’s Thunderous Echoes: The New Science and Finnegans Wake

Abstract The strandentwining intertext of Finnegans Wake both obscures and unveils meaning. The cultural ramifications of James Joyce’s intertext, however, run deep, as he subjects the relevant intertexts to subsequent rewritings in order to multiply meaning. In such context, intertextuality in itself can be likened to a translation, whereby otherness is adapted into a literary space to enable the construction or reconstruction of new significance, thus facilitating a far-reaching cross-cultural dialogue; both author and readers, in turn, assume the role of poeta doctus and litteratus doctus, respectively. Accordingly, the intertexts Joyce has sewn into the text are in constant transformation both via their medium and their audience, as is the case with the Viconian intertext. Giambattista Vico’s The New Science was carefully integrated by Joyce into Finnegans Wake1 and adapted to Irish society; Vico’s philosophical thought, which permeates the Wake, provides structure and enables the layering of intertextual units, thus multiplying significations and intended meanings. Vico’s theories on language and history enable diachronic and anachronic explorations within the Wake, as well as a simultaneous existence of different systems of thought. Joyce’s use of the thunderwords as a primal linguistic expression, coupled with his creative cultural exploits and the systematic structuring of the Wake find their origin in Vico’ The New Science.

Der Totengeist des Laius in Statius’ Thebais

According to a widespread tradition, Laius was buried in Phocis after his death. Areview of the relevant passages in Statius’ Thebaid shows that the poeta doctus alludes to thisversion of the story, but he himself follows a different mythical variant: The body of Laiusremained unburied, which meant that his ghost could not cross the border river to theunderworld. In this way the denied or perverted burial, a dominant thematic concern in theThebaid, is projected back into the prehistory of the plot.

The Poetic Structure of Silius Italicus' Punica (Books I-V)

The Poetic Structure of Silius Italicus' Punica (Books I-V) As concerns their poetic structure, the first five books of Silius’ Punica are very differentiated and complicated. However, all the events of the represented world concentrate around Hannibal and his improba virtus. Historical and mythological ekphrases are connected with Hannibal’s deeds. Aetiological stories seem to be invented by Silius himself. The panegyrical elements refer mainly to Domitian. Prolepses especially deserve to be noticed. Silius is influenced by learned Hellenistic poets, as well as Roman authors, mainly Ennius, Vergil, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus. In fact the author of the Punica can be described as poeta doctus.

»Auszug aus selbstverschuldeter Verständlichkeit«

AbstractOswald Egger presents himself as both poeta vates and poeta doctus, challenging his readers with texts that have often been described as hermetic and thus hermeneutically inaccessible. In recourse to mathematical (topology) and philosophical (Johann Georg Hamann) contexts, the essay shows how poetry on the one hand, science and erudition on the other hand intersect in Egger’s texts in an aesthetically and hermeneutically ambitious way.

Gemma e simposio nel nuovo Posidippo. Con una nota sul κισσύβιον teocriteo (P. Mil. VogI. VIII, 309, col. I, 10- 13 = 3 A.- B.; Theocr. 1,30 ss.)

Summary – The ancient symposion revives in Posidippus with new thematics, evoked both by the donor of the ruby and by the woman who receives it. The decoration of the gem reflects the techne of the poeta doctus, besides revealing a symbolism which can be approached to the Theocritean kissybion.

Poetología y metapoesía en Teócrito: sobre el motivo de los cantores itinerantes en el Idilio VII

My own approach to Theoc. 7 is to analyze closely the rare motif of Simichidas and the goatherd Lycidas as wandering singers. Surely, modern critics have overestimated the fact that the meeting of Simichidas and Lycidas is modelled after various scenes of supernatural encounter in Homer or, especially, in Hesiod. In this article I attempt explore a metapoetical reading of Theoc. 7. 1-51 to separate Theocritean poetology from Callimachean polemics, and contextualize the incipient change from the old paradigm of pastor-poeta into the new one of poeta-pastor. This reversal is basic to the discussion on the Theocritean status of ‘bucolic’ poet in accordance with Philitean aesthetics of poeta doctus.

Kamera i poeta doctus? O filmach Edwarda Żebrowskiego z perspektywy lotu ptaka

Camera and poeta doctus? About Edward Żebrowski’s FilmsThis text conserns the excelent polish director Edwrad Żebrowski’ creation. It has character of synthetic discussion. It shows main formal questions of it this creation and main problems of it. It is considered also the question of anachronism of these movies.

‘Erkenntnistheoretische Maschinen’: Questions about the Sublime in the Work of Raoul Schrott

This paper examines a new mode in recent German poetry. Far from the poetry influenced by the recent re‐emergence of ‘pop’ culture, or the ‘Alltagssprache’ and ‘simple Storys’ of much recent writing from the former GDR, a number of poets have concerned themselves with modern science, particularly quantum mechanics and optics. These are among some of the most significant young poets of recent years (Thomas Kling, Franz Josef Czernin, Barbara Köhler, Durs Grünbein, Raoul Schrott etc.), figuring something which might be dubbed a contemporary of the ‘poeta doctus’. This new discourse is interesting enough in itself, as poetry and science have, in the twentieth century at least, often been thought to be diametrically opposed. However, closer examination of this work, particularly that of Raoul Schrott (b. 1964), an ‘emerging’ and, paradoxically, already very distinguished writer, reveals that poetry and science can be understood as pro‐foundly analogous; particularly in their use of metaphor. Fascinatingly, the contemporary discourse of science is set alongside classical (mythological) models in his work. They are both understood as finally hopeless projects to humanise the vast indifference of the universe: ‘ein anderes sich in die leere/sagen’. The poem as ‘epistemological machine’ is set to interrogate the places where those human maps, models and vocabularies fail. The real territory of Schrott's work is thus revealed – in Hotels (1995), in essays, in four works of recent prose, and especially in Tropen (1998) – to be the boundaries of perception –sub limes– where the models of human understanding fall away and point beyond themselves to an experience of the ‘sublime’.

The Poeta Doctus and the New German Poetry: Raoul Schrott's Tropen

The Poeta Doctus and the New German Poetry: Raoul Schrott's Tropen

La description du déluge dans Avit Carm., 4, 429-540 : usurpatio et renouatio du poncif épique de la tempête

The subject of the 4th canto of the biblical epic written by Avitus from Vienne, De spiritalis historiae gestis, is the Flood. In the final part of the poem (v. 429-540), the author describes the cataclysm which completely destroys the world created by God. As a poeta doctus, Avitus joins the classical epic tradition in which the theme of the storm braved by the hero is a common place, as Seneca the Rhetor’s school exercises confirm. Thus, in Avitus’s poem, classical inspiration can be detected : Vergil’s description of the storm (Aen. 1, 102-141), several storms described by Lucan in his Pharsalia (5, 504- 677; 9, 319-347 and 445-492) and especially the flood in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (1, 244-365) and Seneca’s description and explanation of the stoïc flood in Naturales quaestiones (3, 27). Nevertheless, far from slavish imitation of those classical models, the Christian poet expresses his own creativity by adapting this classical theme to his Christological epic. A close study of Avitus’ description shows a significant work of retractatio and adaptatio of the classical theme, especially by inserting two minor exegetical digressions explaining the typology of the biblical Flood. Therefore, the poet – a bishop – by cleverly blending classical sources such as Virgilian language and images with biblical sources shows proof of originality to expose and defend catholic dogma.

The demiurge of sounds and the poeta doctus

At the start of his career. F.-B. Mâche faced a severe challenge: he could have chosen equally from the aesthetics of E. Varese, J. Cage, postserialism, I. Xenakis or the GRM.<. With special affinities to cultural history, he pinpointed with a keen eye the hidden problems of all the former trends against the background of the shortcomings of our civilization: the deficiencies of artistic content provoked by reason, rationalism-intellectualism, logic or excessive freedom, alienation from the natural-environmental context. With his “naturalist poetics” anticipating the 21st century he explored and mapped both artistically and scientifically all the natural, linguistic, mythological models that could revive composition with the elementary force of originality and an ideal mode of construction. The article presents the poetics and the crystallized “archetypical” units of form: their structuring principles, their “mythemes” of expressive content as well as the types of form themselves conforming to traditional...

El &lt;i&gt;Jacinto&lt;/i&gt; de Euforión y el problema del &lt;i&gt;élegos&lt;/i&gt;

The purpose of this paper is to expound how Euphorion cannot be considered an elegiarum scriptor . In his poem Hyakinthos , this poeta doctus includes several elegiac themes which make us think of a ritual elegiac frame (Hyakinthos, Adonis, Hylas), where the death of μάκαιροι in the prime of beauty and youth becomes insistent. This poem is also a good proof of how Latin elegiacs took up euphorian items, though not necessarily their hexametric verse. And this causes confusion in those who believed in an elegiac Euphorion, that is, in Latin and Greek grammarians and lexicographers.

Friedrich Spee's “Arcadia” Revisited

Literary historians and critics from the nineteenth century to the present have attributed Friedrich Spee's descriptions of nature to his personal experience. Except for a few instances of biblical influence, these passages are variations of the topos locus amoenus with many of its less common classical features: the park-orchard-garden varieties of landscape, typical epithets, and catalogs of trees and plants. In the Trutznachtigall, the section with the largest pattern of the topos are the laudes, commonly considered to be derivations of the Psalms, while the eclogues (“Arcadia”), a genre traditionally associated with the topos, has only a few samples of it. Rather than being a rigid formula the topos becomes an elastic pattern whose size and components Spee tailors to the individual poem, providing at the same time a distinct diction and a variety of formulations. This may be one reason why Spee, who is in every respect a poeta doctus, has been mistaken for a Pre-Romantic poet.