Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Ancient Greek Literature - Literary Criticism, Ancient Greek Poetry - Literary Criticism, Greco-Roman Folklore & Mythology, Femininity, Mythology in Literature

Penelopean Poetics

Name: Penelopean Poetics
Author: Barbara Clayton
ISBN: 9780739107225

by Barbara Clayton

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Overview

A Penelopean Poetics looks at the relationship between gender ideology and the self-referential poetics of the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope. She is a cunning story-teller; her repeated reweavings of Laertes' shroud a figurative replication of the process of oral poetic composition itself. Penelope's web is thus a discourse and it can be construed specifically as feminine. Her gendered poetics celebrates process, multiplicity, and ambiguity and it resists phallocentric discourse by undermining stable and fixed meanings. Penelope's poetics become a discursive thread through which different feminine voices can realize their resistant capacities. Author Barbara Clayton's work contributes to discussions in the classics as well as literary criticism, sex and gender studies, and women's studies.

Synopsis

A Penelopean Poetics looks at the relationship between gender ideology and the self-referential poetics fo the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope. Her poetics become a discursive thread through which different feminine voices can realize their resistant capacities. Author, Barbara Clayton, informs discussions in the classics, gender studies, and literary criticism.

About the Author, Barbara Clayton

Barbara Clayton teaches in the Classics Department and Introduction to the Humanities Program at Stanford University.

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Editorials

Ralph J. Hexter

In A Penelopean Poetics, Barbara Clayton defines the true texture of Homer's Odyssey. Carefully attending to the warp and woof of recent scholarship on Greek epic and oral poetry as well as recent psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, Clayton beautifully and simply identifies precisely those threads in the weave of the poem that are most Penelopean in their subtle cunning. In her surprising yet persuasive new reading, Odysseus and Homer emerge as most themselves when they are most like Penelope.

Mark W. Edwards

In Dr. Clayton's book she establishes a productive alliance between up-to-date theoretical work on women's studies and current thinking about the nature of oral poetry. Her lucid understanding of the ideas of Lacan and Cixous (among others) gives her valuable new insights into the part played by gender in understanding the Odyssey, and she includes an excellent study of the figure of Penelope in later literature. The book extends our appreciation of the Odyssey in exciting new ways, and should become essential reading both for classical scholars and for those interested in literature generally.