Subjecting Verses
Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real
Chapter One
TOWARD A NEW HISTORY OF GENRE: ELEGY AND THE REAL
It seems to me rather that we have to look at failures of form, the impossibility of certain kinds of representation in a certain context, the flaws, limits, obstacles, which become the clue to the social truth or social meaning.
-Jameson 1998: 361
It can often be the emphasis on the impossibility of representation that gives the clue and organizes things.
-Jameson 1998: 369
THE PURPOSE of this book is to provide a history or genealogy of the Latin love elegy. That history is problematic and demands a more comprehensive explanation in part because it is so short. Many books have already treated the form, and in recent years several have offered exciting and sophisticated readings of its rhetoric and modes of characterization (Greene 1998; Kennedy 1993; Veyne 1988), but none has offered a convincing exegesis of this subgenre's sudden flaring into existence and its just as sudden extinction. Indeed, most treatments have larg ... read full excerpt from Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real ebook
