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Virgil on the Popular Stage *

Costas Panayotakis

in New Directions in Ancient Pantomime

This chapter looks at the sources that assert that three sequences from the Aeneid were performed in pantomime—those dealing with Dido, Turnus, and the katabasis to the Underworld (tales dealing with ... More

This chapter looks at the sources that assert that three sequences from the Aeneid were performed in pantomime—those dealing with Dido, Turnus, and the katabasis to the Underworld (tales dealing with love, death, violence, and vivid spectacle): Macrobius, for example, says that the love story of Dido and Aeneas is kept alive by the incessant gestures and songs of the actors; whilst Augustine suggests that the majority of his readers would be familiar with the episode between Aeneas and Anchises in the Underworld through performances of it in the theatre. Panayotakis argues that Virgil's poetry was important to the development of pantomime and of Latin literary aesthetics. This chapter engages with the issue of pantomime libretti.Less

Introduction: The Mandaean World

Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley

in The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People

Starts by tracing the origin of the Mandaeans to the Jordan/Palestine area (from whence they emigrated, in the first to third centuries CE, to Iran and Iraq), and gives a brief history to the ... More

Starts by tracing the origin of the Mandaeans to the Jordan/Palestine area (from whence they emigrated, in the first to third centuries CE, to Iran and Iraq), and gives a brief history to the present. Next, the characteristics of the religion are outlined: Mandaeans are the only still surviving group of Gnostics; their religion has an extensive literature with multifarious mythological traditions and intricate rituals; and their world is essentially three‐tiered, with an upper (heavenly) Lightworld on which much emphasis is placed, a middle earthly human world (Tibil), and a gloomy Underworld (which does not receive much attention). An overview is given of ancient Mandaean literature (the Ginza; the liturgies; the Book of John; ritual commentaries; and other works). There is then a brief note on European traditional Mandaean scholarship, which also covers the work of Lady Ethel S. Drower (1879–1972), who broke traditional scholarly moulds and did much of her work on the Mandaeans in the field. Lastly, the parameters and purpose of the book are described.Less

Ruha

Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley

in The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People

Focuses on the Mandaean mythological figure of Ruha (Spirit), who is presented largely as a leader of the forces of darkness opposing those of the Lightworld. She has been traditionally regarded as ... More

Focuses on the Mandaean mythological figure of Ruha (Spirit), who is presented largely as a leader of the forces of darkness opposing those of the Lightworld. She has been traditionally regarded as evil, although there are good reasons to regard her as a fallen wisdom figure. It examines the Mandaean stories in which Ruha appears as ambiguous (double‐sided or dual) or in a positive light. Four sets of mythological traditions, taken from a variety of texts, illustrate the points made: the descent of the ‘utra (Lightworld (heavenly) figure) Hibil Ziwa (Radiance) into the Underworld; the creation of Tibil (the earthly world) and of the human beings; Ruha and the ‘utras; and Ruha's self‐revelations and identifications with Lightbeings.Less

Epilogue

Jürgen Pieters

in Speaking With the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History

Before Petrarch, the conversation with the dead was located elsewhere – with Homer and Virgil – and, even with Petrarch's contemporary and fellow countryman Dante, the dialogue takes place in the ... More

Before Petrarch, the conversation with the dead was located elsewhere – with Homer and Virgil – and, even with Petrarch's contemporary and fellow countryman Dante, the dialogue takes place in the Underworld. Petrarch wrote down his reflections on the conversation with the dead in the first half of the fourteenth century. To speak with the dead is to become aware of the productive force of what Hannah Arendt called the tears of remembrance, but also of the feeling of loss that is constitutive of all the memories. In general, the conversations conducted with the dead are a constant reminder of them.Less

Unforced Marches: A Virgilian Memoir (2007)

Willard Spiegelman

in Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays

This chapter examines Virgil's epic poem Aeneid. It focuses on the chapters concerning the last night of Troy, Dido, and Aeneas and the Underworld. It analyzes various translations of the Aeneid and ... More

This chapter examines Virgil's epic poem Aeneid. It focuses on the chapters concerning the last night of Troy, Dido, and Aeneas and the Underworld. It analyzes various translations of the Aeneid and suggests that this work contains important Roman virtues born out of the Roman sense of duty and work. It also argues that unlike his contemporaries, Virgil worked teleologically.Less

The Chthonic Sublime

Patrick R. Crowley

in The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome

This chapter examines the Underworld in relation to ancient notions of perspective and the sublime. It demonstrates how ancient attempts to conceptualize, depict, and even construct the spaces of the ... More

This chapter examines the Underworld in relation to ancient notions of perspective and the sublime. It demonstrates how ancient attempts to conceptualize, depict, and even construct the spaces of the Underworld, particularly in the cramped space of the tomb, were achieved by establishing the limits of the field of vision itself—limits that were constituted reflexively by their capacity to be exceeded or transgressed.Less

Came the Dawn

John Baxter

in Von Sternberg

Underworld's success appeared astonishing when von Sternberg sailed for Germany in 1929 to make The Blue Angel. Hollywood regarded his career as almost over. Although his many clashes with management ... More

Underworld's success appeared astonishing when von Sternberg sailed for Germany in 1929 to make The Blue Angel. Hollywood regarded his career as almost over. Although his many clashes with management contributed, his fall was mostly due to the impact of talking pictures. Von Sternberg's decline began with The Last Command, which won favorable reviews but little profit. He showed no alarm at his failures, even boasting to visitors on the set of his next film, The Docks of New York, that his prestige remained as high as ever. The tone of Docks of New York is characteristically gentle, almost feminine. Even the violence is handled playfully.Less

Maximal Aesthetics: Network Novels

Patrick Jagoda

in Network Aesthetics

The network novel is a late-twentieth-century literary genre that reworks and intensifies the cultural concerns regarding a world interconnected by communication and transportation networks, and made ... More

The network novel is a late-twentieth-century literary genre that reworks and intensifies the cultural concerns regarding a world interconnected by communication and transportation networks, and made unprecedentedly dependent upon an informational economy. This chapter examines two novels—Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999)—that foreground the maximal capacities of network aesthetics. When read together, these texts disclose both the novel form’s epistemological capacity to know networks and to record the structural impossibility of knowing networks through language alone. These novels open up a series of concepts that network form encourages us to think in new ways, including the “knowledge,” “history,” “event,” and “materiality.” The various clashes of formal logics in these texts run parallel to paradoxical sociopolitical logics inherent in the discourse and material practices associated with US networks of late capitalism.Less

‘Now Let us Go into this Blind World’: Dante, Virgil, Homer and T. S. Eliot

Jürgen Pieters

in Speaking With the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History

This chapter considers the contributions of Dante, Virgil, Homer, and T. S. Eliot in the late Middle Ages and the literature of Antiquity. Virgil's words are open to a different interpretation: in ... More

This chapter considers the contributions of Dante, Virgil, Homer, and T. S. Eliot in the late Middle Ages and the literature of Antiquity. Virgil's words are open to a different interpretation: in his work and in his voice, his four great forebears continue to live on, and the honour that they convey upon him is one in which they themselves also participate. The conversations that Aeneas and Ulysses have in the Underworld are of the utmost importance: they are unique and living testimonies in which the reader is allowed a glimpse of mysteries that are normally kept hidden. Eliot's verse redirected the parasitic logic that he considered detrimental to his own age. The dead deserve gratitude and the poet's constant reminders of their enduring presence.Less

“O Soul, Come Back!”: A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China

Ying-shih Yü

Josephine Chiu-Duke and Michael S. Duke (eds)

in Chinese History and Culture: Sixth Century B.C.E. to Seventeenth Century

Arguing that the fu, “Summons” or “Recall” ritual was the crystallization of pre-Buddhist Chinese ideas about human survival after death, this article also demonstrates how the notions of the hun and ... More

Arguing that the fu, “Summons” or “Recall” ritual was the crystallization of pre-Buddhist Chinese ideas about human survival after death, this article also demonstrates how the notions of the hun and po souls and the afterlife came into being. It ends by examining the changing conceptions of the two afterworlds before Buddhism transformed them into “Heaven” and “Hell.”Less

. Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir

Tom Gunning

in Cinematicity in Media History

This chapter, written by Tom Gunning, pursues the relentless immersion, at street level, of the urbanite in a city doubly composed of the seen and unseen, image and shadow. Making evident what the ... More

This chapter, written by Tom Gunning, pursues the relentless immersion, at street level, of the urbanite in a city doubly composed of the seen and unseen, image and shadow. Making evident what the city shares with the uneasy world-view of film noir, Gunning’s essay casts light on the ways in which experiences of urban culture, modernity, and the cinema are inextricably linked. This brings into play another aspect of cinematicity, namely that the city from the nineteenth century onwards had become what Gunning calls a ‘hyper-visual zone’ whose inhabitants were bombarded by an array of visual stimuli and partial impressions, as if preparing them for the onslaught of the moving pictures themselves. Beneath the visible facade of the city, as the detective figure that emerged in the literature of the period makes abundantly clear, also however lurk dark corners, dangerous places, and invisible threats. It is here, Gunning argues, that the police’s bull’s eye lantern and the flash of the journalist’s camera make visible what was invisible.Less

Silent Films

Joseph McBride

in Hawks on Hawks

In this chapter, Hawks discusses his early comedy shorts he made during the silent era and his time as a producer for Paramount. He describes his close relationship with Victor Fleming and his ... More

In this chapter, Hawks discusses his early comedy shorts he made during the silent era and his time as a producer for Paramount. He describes his close relationship with Victor Fleming and his experiences working with Norma Shearer, Ben Hecht, Joe Von Stemberg, and Ernst Lubitsch. Hawks also speaks about his departure from Paramount, his time as a director at Fox, and the impact of color and sound on his films.Less

The Rugged Consumer Bildungsroman

Raymond Malewitz

in The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

This chapter examines the shift from left-leaning libertarian countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s to the neoliberal libertarianism of the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter begins by positing that ... More

This chapter examines the shift from left-leaning libertarian countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s to the neoliberal libertarianism of the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter begins by positing that accounts of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, like Franco Moretti's description of the prototypical bildungsroman, proceed by a principle of ideological containment that Moretti calls “the interiorization of contradiction” between an individual's formless creativity and the conservative social constraints that redirect this energy to serve normative ends. This same principle of “interiorization” constitutes the central plot of Don DeLillo's Underworld and Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club; both novels’ protagonists seem to rebel against but ultimately reinforce the structural conditions that they purport to combat. These bildungsroman plots thus testifies to the ways in which the earlier countercultural possibilities of rugged consumerism become integrated into the dominant institutions and formations of late-century America.Less

Drakontes, Earth, and the Dead

Daniel Ogden

in Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds

Chapter 7 considers the general associations of drakontes with the earth, the underworld and underworld powers, notably Hecate and the Erinyes. Of particular interest is the propensity of the ... More

Chapter 7 considers the general associations of drakontes with the earth, the underworld and underworld powers, notably Hecate and the Erinyes. Of particular interest is the propensity of the returning heroic dead to turn into the drakontes that move from beneath the earth to the surface and make themselves anew. Attica, ever proud of the autochthonous origins of its population, boasted a suite of foundational and protective anguiform heroes in Cecrops, Ericthonius, Cychreus and, as we contend, the lawgiver Drakōn. The following pair of chapters turns to the group of kindly anguiform deities that seemingly rises to prominence, at any rate qua anguiforms, and seemingly as a phalanx, in the late fifth century BC.Less

Chthonic Ingredients and Thematic Concerns: The Shaping of the Necromancy in the Thebaid

Ruth Parkes

in Ritual and Religion in Flavian Epic

This chapter explores how Statius constructs his necromancy to suit the themes and concerns of the Thebaid. The first part argues that the inclusion of a chthonic episode befits the dominance of the ... More

This chapter explores how Statius constructs his necromancy to suit the themes and concerns of the Thebaid. The first part argues that the inclusion of a chthonic episode befits the dominance of the infernal realm in the poem and the key motifs of perverted burial and boundary breaking. The second section considers Statius’ choice of necromancy instead of katabasis or corpse resurrection. Despite the emphasis laid on permeable boundaries in the episode, Statius chooses a chthonic rite in which the participants do not make a trip to the Underworld, reflecting the inability of those who engaged in such a nefarious war to pass successfully between the boundaries of the different realms. The last part explores how the restricted and negative learning experience of Eteocles reflects the poem’s presentation of the Theban people’s self–destructive, inward–looking tendencies.Less

Back Out of Hell: The Virtual Katabasis and Initiation of Silius’ Minucius

Robert Cowan

in Ritual and Religion in Flavian Epic

Silius depicts Fabius Maximus’ rescue of his Master of Horse, Minucius, from a skirmish with Hannibal near Gerunium as a virtual katabasis or descent to the Underworld, but one which self–consciously ... More

Silius depicts Fabius Maximus’ rescue of his Master of Horse, Minucius, from a skirmish with Hannibal near Gerunium as a virtual katabasis or descent to the Underworld, but one which self–consciously draws attention to, rather than occluding, its own symbolic nature. This emphasis on the virtual quality of the katabasis serves as a commentary on other poets’ exploitation of katabatic imagery. More significantly it contributes to the depiction of Minucius’ salvation as a sort of mystic initiation into the ways of Fabius. For the relationship between ‘literal’ initiation and ‘allegorical’ katabatic myth is parallel to that between the ‘literal’ skirmish and the ‘virtual’ katabasis it evokes. The depiction of Fabius as a figure of initiation and salvation contributes to the ambiguity of his status as simultaneously quintessential Republican and synecdochic hero.Less

Katabasis in Danielewski’s House of Leaves and two other recent American novels

Finn Fordham and Royal Holloway

in Mark Z. Danielewski

Finn Fordham discusses the footnotes in House of Leaves, describing them as part of the text’s ‘architextural underworld.’ He claims that Danielewski’s novel shares with David Foster Wallace’s ... More

Finn Fordham discusses the footnotes in House of Leaves, describing them as part of the text’s ‘architextural underworld.’ He claims that Danielewski’s novel shares with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld an attention both to ‘clandestine productions and samizdat disseminations of filmed sequences’, and to the epic convention of katabasis, a descent into underground structures and underworlds which is common in classical literature. Focusing particularly on the labyrinthine interweaving of footnotes in chapter IX, he compares language itself in the novel to an underworld, arguing that Danielewski performs ‘a gothic horror spin take on language as an unencompassable labyrinth.’Less