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“Inaccurate, as lady linguists often are”: Herodotus and Kleist on the Language of the Amazons

in The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

This chapter examines the Histories of Herodotus and the tragedy Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist, focusing on how their representation of the misspeaking Amazon reveals how error can render all ... More

This chapter examines the Histories of Herodotus and the tragedy Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist, focusing on how their representation of the misspeaking Amazon reveals how error can render all pairings unlikely. Histories is about the formation of a hybrid nation formed by a union between the Scythian men and the Amazons, while Penthesilea retells the story of the encounter between the Greeks and the Amazons before the walls of Troy, and the ill-fated love affair between Achilles and Penthesilea, the Amazon Queen. Herodotus and Kleist both describe a failed figure called “solecism” that they attribute to the Amazon and which generates the possibility of uncontainable and unpredictable errance. The chapter also considers what Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz claimed to be a reliable marker in the reconstruction of the history of language: the names of rivers. Herodotus and Kleist both use the term Tanaïs for their origin narratives, which simultaneously names and fails to name a river—an unreliability that suggests that it is impossible to reduce errance to a coherent fluvial course.Less

The Last Maniacal Folly of Heinrich Von Kleist (A FICTION)

Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe

in Crimes of Art + Terror

On the afternoon of November 21, 1811, the writer Heinrich von Kleist was the perpetrator of a murder and the victim of a suicide. This double deed was his greatest crime and most infamous work of ... More

On the afternoon of November 21, 1811, the writer Heinrich von Kleist was the perpetrator of a murder and the victim of a suicide. This double deed was his greatest crime and most infamous work of art, the enactment at last on the stage of the real world of what he had suggested in his play Penthesilea.Less

Louis Malle’s Kleistian War Machine: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Imperceptible in Black Moon (1975)

Colin Gardner

in Deleuze and the Animal

Framed through an analysis of Kleist’s molecular war machine in his play, Penthesilea, in which Achilles and Penthesilea form a new assemblage of affective war, this chapter explores Louis Malle’s ... More

Framed through an analysis of Kleist’s molecular war machine in his play, Penthesilea, in which Achilles and Penthesilea form a new assemblage of affective war, this chapter explores Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975) where the battle of the sexes becomes the catalyst for a new series of becomings. The film takes the form of a waking dream as a teenage fugitive, Lily is led through a series of depersonalized movements by a unicorn to a secluded Dordogne farm where Kleist’s utopian “mad duality” is manifested though a strange, non-Oedipal family dynamic in which a mute brother and his sheep-herding sister – both also called Lily – live with a group of naked children and a bedridden elderly woman whose companion is a talking rat and where the animals are treated as equal agencies in the narrative. Although by film’s end Brother and Sister Lily become caught up in the ravages of a gender war, teenage Lily inherits this ‘deterritorialized velocity of affect’ by adopting the role of the breastfeeding mother to the unicorn, all in relation to the becoming multiplicity of the pack: in short, a true war machine that envelops both protagonists and spectators alike in a transformed zone of indiscernibility.Less

An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2

Fiona Cox

in Virgil and his Translators

This is one of the few chapters in the present volume that address the role of women in Virgilian translation practices. More specifically, Cox focuses on Marie de Gournay’s translation of Aeneid 2. ... More

This is one of the few chapters in the present volume that address the role of women in Virgilian translation practices. More specifically, Cox focuses on Marie de Gournay’s translation of Aeneid 2. While de Gournay’s translation is marked by imprecisions, it also conveys her sense of pride—a pride she takes in breaching the stronghold of men as she places herself into the lineage of French translators of Virgil. The author argues that de Gournay uses her translation as part of a struggle for sexual equality, a struggle that is especially intensified by her loneliness and sense of alienation within her own time and culture.Less

Postcolonial Amazons: Decentering Athenian perspectives to rethink warrior women and matriarchy

Walter Duvall Penrose

in Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity and Courage in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature

The time has come to re-evaluate the figure of the Amazon in classical literature from a different perspective, from a “peripheral” rather than an Athenian Greek point of view. Using the postcolonial ... More

The time has come to re-evaluate the figure of the Amazon in classical literature from a different perspective, from a “peripheral” rather than an Athenian Greek point of view. Using the postcolonial technique of “provincializing Athens” allows us to rethink the historicity of Amazons in relation to other “barbarians.” The term “Amazon” was an outside, Greek label, but the women to whom it points warrant further investigation. Amazons allegedly lived in the same locations as Thracians, Libyans, Sauromatians, Scythians, and Colchians, all historical peoples among whom women fought. Amazons were conflated and confused with these more historical warrior women in Greek literature. Amazons were associated with exaggerated matriarchies by the Greeks, because they could not understand a society where women held power or fought.Less

‘Marpesia cautes’: Voicing Amazons, England and Ireland, 1640

Deana Rankin

in Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct ... More

Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct interstices that they make themselves known. This chapter explores these ideas with respect to the performance of the Amazon on the English and Irish stage across the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on a particular moment in early 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, when, in London, Sir William Davenant’s Salamanca Spolia is performed at court and, in Dublin, Henry Burnell’s play Landgartha is performed at the public theatre in Werburgh Street. It locates these coinciding performances in the context of two evolving and competing English literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon.Less

Seneca Censored

Helen Slaney

in The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History

The English theatrical repertoire in the eighteenth century was dominated by plays that appealed to the audience’s sympathies, showing characters experiencing everyday dilemmas rather than debating ... More

The English theatrical repertoire in the eighteenth century was dominated by plays that appealed to the audience’s sympathies, showing characters experiencing everyday dilemmas rather than debating the fate of mythical kingdoms. Seneca was therefore a less popular choice for translators, and those playwrights who did make use of his works transformed them into sentimental dramas. The increasing prevalence of stage naturalism in combination with the philhellenic movement ultimately led A. W. Schlegel to denounce Seneca as untheatrical: ‘frigid and bombastic’, his characters ‘colossal, misshapen marionettes’. For Schlegel’s contemporary Heinrich von Kleist, however, the marionette represented artistic perfection. Kleist’s hyper-tragedy Penthesilea challenged prevailing views of both classical antiquity and dramaturgical propriety.Less