Browse our books below. You can also search for books.
EDMUNDS, L., Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore / London, n.d.(>2001). XX,201p. Paperback. 'Lowell Edmunds has written a book that provides what is expected and appreciated in a theoretical study: the scholarship is extensive and well organized into arguments which are themselves descriptive, provocative, challenging, and supported by a close reading of a variety of selections from Catullus, Horace, Vergil, and Ovid. In the first five chapters, Edmunds discusses various components of poetry - text, poet, reader, persona, addressee. In each, Edmunds discredits textual elements that appear to offer an unchanging, verifiable phenomenon upon which to base and judge intertextual studies. (...) It is in the reader, in hermeneutics, that the text is salvaged from indeterminacy, the reader, that is, who treats the poem as an aesthetic creation with its own (however the reader interprets it) individuality. Already in challenging the boundaries of the text itself and restoring them through a readership, Edmunds has laid the groundwork for the reader-based approach to intertextuality, given full treatment in chapter eight. (...) Edmunds develops his own reader-based theory of intertextuality. To summarize, an allusion is a text's (T1) quotation (Q1) of the words (Q2) of another text (T2), one which gives a new context (C1) to the context of the quoted text (C2). C2 is evoked in one of three ways: 1) through an expanded context in the quoting text; 2) through a continuously assumed context of the quoted text like the context of Homer's epics in the Aeneid; or 3) through parody in which the text 'repeats or closely follows' another text (140). Edmunds also explores the process of Bakhtin's theory of dialogization when a text alludes to the language of a system, 'verbal categories, literary and nonliterary, larger than single texts' (p. 143). Systems briefly explored are words from Roman law, social institutions, and business, as well as myth and genre. In allusions there is an inherent uncertainty as to whether the poetic meaning of the non poetic/mythic/generic words supplants, succumbs to, or integrates the meanings of the system words. As each meaning asserts itself, the text creates a dialogue in which 'neither side has the last word' (p. 145). Thus, intertextuality presupposes a degree of undecidability that cannot be resolved through inherent intertextual signs or markers, primarily because even if such signs exist, their existence depends on whether a reader recognizes them or not. Edmunds' major accomplishment is the systematic way in which he presents and integrates or rejects various linguistic theories in setting forth his own theory of intertextuality, filling a lacuna in the field of intertextual studies without being verbose even when confronting abstruse concepts. (...) The readings offered in Edmunds book are notable for their accuracy, thoroughness, and creativity, (...) What Edmunds proves is that all critical interpretation of intertextuality is reader-based, an admission that many of the best interpreters refuse to make. We require a locus or at least a boundary; we fear uncertainty as much as solipsism. Edmunds shows that many of these boundaries are ambiguous, and all are subject to the particular reading of the interpreter. But critical chaos is avoided because the 'interpretive community ultimately decides on validity, and classics is that community for the study of intertextuality in Roman poetry' (p.168).' (DAVID J. KUYAT in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.08.37). € 20.00 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9780801877414