L’oratore scriteriato. Per una storia letteraria e politica di Tersite di Luigi Spina
Abstract
312 RHETORICA dissident intellectuals from the universities to lay communities through censorship, imprisonment, and capital punishment, it could not undo the damage wrought by dissident academics such as Wyche and Thorpe, for "the products of intellectual labor, the pedagogical apparatuses that are exportable from one milieu to another, once set in motion, can long outlast the power of the individual teacher to teach" (p. 219). Pedagogies, Intellectuals, and Dissent evinces the meticulous scholarship and nuanced treatment of abstruse rhetorical issues that one would expect from the author of Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991). Copeland's analyses of intellectual labor, pedagogies, the "literal sense," and the politics of childhood illuminate the story of dissent and repression well known to scholars of Lollardy. Her study is a must for specialists in late medieval England. Though non-medievalists may struggle with Copeland's dense analyses of politico-religious issues, I expect that scholars of contemporary pedagogy and rhetoric—particularly oppositional pedagogies and rhetorics of resistance and coercion—will find this book well worth the effort. Karen A. Winstead The Ohio State University Luigi Spina, L'oratore scriteriato. Per una storia letteraria e política di Tersite, Napoli : Loffredo, 2001, pp. 124. Luigi Spina's short essay brilliantly shows how rich (and sometimes contradictory) can be the rhetorical reuse of a mythical character. He starts, in fact, from a recent episode in Italian political debate about liberalism, in which the category of "tersitismo" appeared as a clearly negative label, as a synonym of populism. With an interesting ambivalence this topical image is sometimes reverted, so that the ugly and misshapen Thersites becomes the symbol of an alternative vision, of a true popular polemic against war and power. The rehabilitation of a scapegoat is in fact a widespread operation. In the longue durée of Thersites it leads to some stimulating parallels with various characters of myth and history: Hephaistos, Aesopus, Socrates, Demosthenes ... Till to the most paradoxical issue: the latent identification of Thersites with his most powerful enemy, Odysseus, which starts from a significant passage of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and comes from Thersites' effective rhetorical strategy (the paradigm of cynical rhetoric). Spina's critical path follows Thersites' ambivalence through some an cient and modern significant versions. First of all, of course, Homer's 67 verses, and their impressive use of characterization, intentional ellypis, and accurate mixture of mimesis and dieghesis. Secondly, Quintus of Smyrne's epic continuation, that for the first time puts Thersithes in connection with a fe male figure, Penthesilea. A very important moment in the modem reception Reviews 313 is certainly the Elisabethan stage: first of all William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602), "an Iliad retold by Thersites" according to Gérard Genette. In this extremely polyphonic play the hero embodies in fact the radical demys tification of the epic tradition. From a stylistic point of view it is remarkable the anthrozoomorphic imagery frequently connected with Thersites. The Iron Age (1612) concludes Thomas Heywood's complex mythological fresco; its first part ends with Thersites' metaliterary monologue. He plays the role of the "rayling rogue", who came to Troy "to laugh at mad men" and finds a "meeting soul" in the famous Trojan spy, responsible of the fall of Troy: Sinon. Finally, Dryden's classicistic rewriting of Shakespeare's drama is focussed on Thersites' anticlericalism, and on his skeptical neutrality. Even in this important moment of modern reception Thersites' image wavers between the negative Homeric topic and the positive liberating force of comicality. The XXth century presents the culminating point of Thersites' rehabil itation. Moreover, its tendency to experimentation enlarges the spectrum of rewritings. The Italian latinist Concetto Marchiesi adopts a very specific mix ture of autobiography and fiction. In his II libro di Tersite (1920) the hero stands for the isolation of the protesting intellectual, full of Horatian irony and completely lacking Homeric aggressivity. Stefan Zweig's drama Tersites (sic) (1907) offers a completely new tragic version, that shows the Freudian hidden side of the Homeric text. We face here a common feature of XXth century poet ics: the exaltation of defeat as a productive force and the consequent devalua tion of victory as a sterile...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2002-06-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2002.0017
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