This paper considers Carson’s rewriting of Heracles’ tragic madness— through the art of collage, an assembling and disassambling of textual fragments, scraps of papers, drawings, chromatic smears, and sketches—as an imagistic site for theorizing the anti-normative materiality, physical and metaphysical, of par-a-noia. I make a case for a materiality of par-a-noia by proposing a comparison with Alain Badiou’s Marxist political formalism. The distinctive formal trait of H of H, verbal and pictorial juxtaposition, invites us to think of par-a-noia as an (...) aesthetico-political radicality located on the edge of a voiding of thought (noein), a radicality that, as I suggest at the end, can be aligned with modes of non-normate cognition, with neuroqueer countersociality. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the generation gap in Aristophanes' construction of his persona throughout Wasps, Clouds, and Peace. It contends that in Wasps and Clouds Aristophanes defines the relationship with his audience and his rivals by presenting himself as the figure of a paternal son. The same stance shapes the comic poet's generic self-positioning in the initial scene of Peace, where the parody of Euripides' Aeolus and Bellerophon evinces a corrective attitude in relation not only to the troubled (...) images of fatherhood offered in the two tragic plays, but also to Aristophanes' unsuccessful performances as a paternal son in his earlier comedies. Euripidean intertextuality thus serves as a discursive medium through which Aristophanes dramatizes the turning points of his poetic autobiography. (shrink)

This article argues that in the opening of the Aethiopica Heliodorus' refashioning of the epic tradition is assimilated to Odysseus' predatory survey of the suitors' corpses in Book 22 of the Odyssey. The initial scene of the novel reenacts an Odyssean simile that compares the suitors' bodies to dead fish on a beach. Heliodorus' intricate reconfiguration of this Homeric tableau results in his self-reflexive theorizing of ecphrastic visuality and of the intertextual poetics of predation. The scanning of the remains of (...) the (half-) dead men figures the belated novelist's reckoning of the textual resources available to him. By capitalizing on the ecphrastic power of the Odyssean simile, Heliodorus styles his devouring gaze upon Homeric epic as a paradoxical endeavor to bring a dead image to life. (shrink)