FIGURING THE ICONOCLAST: THE EROS OF WINE IN TWO POEMS BY ABŪ NUWĀS AND THE SYMPOSIUM OF PLATO Öffentlichkeit

Abstract

FIGURING THE ICONOCLAST: THE EROS OF WINE IN TWO POEMS BY ABŪ NUWĀS AND THE SYMPOSIUM OF PLATO

By Christine N. Kalleeny

My dissertation is a new comparative study that examines the vital relationships among erotic desire, wine, intoxication, poetry and philosophy in the wine song of the medieval Arab poet AbÅ« NuwÄs and the Symposium of Plato. Through a close textual analysis of the figure of wine (khamr) in two of AbÅ« NuwÄs's major wine poems, I show that the wine song of AbÅ« NuwÄs can be read both as a reflection on and performance of the erotic, seductive and intoxicating experience of poetic language. More precisely, I show how wine is an 'excessive' and therefore iconoclastic 'figure' in that it violates the ideative and semantic strictures imposed by language and in so doing, eludes 'meaning.' Ultimately, I argue that AbÅ« NuwÄs's poetry indicates that intoxication is a commensurate topic of poetry since poetic language, unlike the positivistic language of philosophy, does not presume to 'satisfy' humanity's desire to know, envision, or comprehend 'truth' in its totality.' Rather, poetry celebrates the unknowable.

I then introduce the Symposium as a 'philosophical' lens for considering the 'anti-philosophical' strains of AbÅ« NuwÄs's wine song. Reading Plato alongside AbÅ« NuwÄs is insightful insofar as the traditions of Greek and Islamic epistemology renounce poetry and drunkenness as marginal modes of experience. Through an examination of key episodes of the dialogue, I show that the Symposium is an erotic dialogue whose language is like wine in that it exceeds the 'confines' of a positively philosophical vision. More precisely, I read the Symposium as a literary and erotic dialogue that subversively consorts with the very forms of desire--intoxication and poetry--that pose as a menace to its famous 'philosophical' paradigm. Ultimately, in staging a 'dialectic' between the apogee of a 'modern' medieval school of poetry and the fifth-century patriarch of Western metaphysics, my dissertation challenges the premise of the age-old 'quarrel' between the tradition of metaphysics, common to both Greek and Islamic epistemology, and the poetic tradition.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1
Part I: The Eros of Khamr : Poetic Seduction ...........................................................................24
Introduction to Part I ..................................................................................................................24
Chapter 1: The Game that Never Ends ..................................................................................29
Chapter 2: Tempting the Theologian: the 'Cure' of Wine's Seduction ...............................78
Part II: Erotic Knowledge: Wine, Philosophy and Poetry in the Symposium .....................114
Introduction to Part II ...............................................................................................................114
Chapter 3: Metaphysical Eros .............................................................................................120
Chapter 4: Bacchanalian Eros .............................................................................................167
Conclusion to Part II ................................................................................................................235
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................241
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................254

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Comparative Literature, Classical
Stichwort	wine song Abū Nuwās Plato khamriyya Symposium
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Nouvet, Claire, Emory University
Committee Members	White, Deborah Elise, Emory University Corrigan, Kevin, Emory University Kennedy, Philip F., New York University

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