Epic Afterlives: Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva Público
Ross, Ariel Julie (2010)
Published
Abstract
"Epic Afterlives: Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva" takes as its starting point the repetition within the history of classical epic poetry of the hero's journey to the underworld, asking how this scene functions in each poem in which it appears, and how it functions within the poetic tradition. I argue that each poetic representation of the underworld, which necessarily involves a conception of the afterlife, works within the poem to fulfill simultaneous wishes to revive and revisit the past, and to gain knowledge of the future. The Introduction to "Epic Afterlives" examines the poetic constructions of the topographies and temporalities of underworld and afterlife in the Odyssey, in Virgil's Aeneid, and in Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and the works of Walter Benjamin, focusing particularly on those moments when it seems that "past, present and future are strung together," as Freud says, "on the thread of the wish that runs through them." The dissertation argues that, following the violent advent of modernity which renders the epic an essentially "dead" form, the wishes, desires, or drives that once found expression in those epic underworlds live out linguistic afterlives, however fragmentary or phantasmal, in other literary forms, and in particular in lyric poetry. The following chapters consider the poetry of Charles Baudelaire as it confronts a "change in the structure of experience" in 19th century Paris which makes it increasingly difficult for the poet to imagine any kind of afterlife at all, and the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, who responded to the terrible difficulties of life in, or in exile from, Soviet Russia by envisioning, with ever-increasing detail, a refuge for herself and for all poets in an "other-world."
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................................................................... 1-33
"On the thread of the wish": Creating Epic Afterlives
Chapter 1............................................................................ 34-111
Reading the Disaster: Homer, Dante and Baudelaire
Chapter 2............................................................................ 112-179
Reading the Blank: Poe and Baudelaire
Chapter 3............................................................................ 180-256
Writing the Wires: Tsvetaeva with Pasternak and Rilke
Chapter 4............................................................................ 257-325
Writing the Truth: Tsvetaeva's Other-world
Appendix 1......................................................................... 326-333
"Le Voyage"
Appendix 2......................................................................... 334-346
"Wires"
Appendix 3......................................................................... 347-364
"Otherworldly Evening"
List of Abbreviations .............................................................. 365
Bibliography .......................................................................... 366-373
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