The notorious image of Pandora haunts mythology: a woman created as punishment for the crimes of man, she is the bearer of hope yet also responsible for the Earth’s desolation. She binds together perpetuating dichotomies that underlie the most fundamental aspects of the Western canon: beauty and evil, body and soul, depth and superficiality, truth and lie. Speaking in multiplicity, Pandora emerges as the first sign of female complexity. In this compelling study, Vered Lev Kenaan offers a radical revision of the Greek myth of the first woman. She argues that Pandora leaves a decisive mark on ancient poetics and shows that we can unravel the profound impact of Pandora’s image once we recognize that Pandora embodies the very idea of the ancient literary text. Locating the myth of the first woman right at the heart of feminist interrogation of gender and textuality, Pandora’s Senses moves beyond a feminist critique of masculine hegemony by challenging the reading of Pandora as a one-dimensional embodiment of the misogynist vision of the feminine. Uncovering Pandora as a textual principle operating outside of the feminine, Lev Kenaan shows the centrality of this iconic figure among the poetics of such central genres as the cosmological and didactic epic, the Platonic dialogue, the love elegy, and the ancient novel. Pandora’s Senses innovates our understanding of gender as a critical lens through which to view ancient literature.
Author(s): Vered Lev Kenaan
Series: Wisconsin Studies in Classics
Edition: 1
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 272
Contents
......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Introduction......Page 16
Pandora, Once Again......Page 30
The Genealogy of Pandora
......Page 37
Misogynist Responses to Pandora
......Page 44
Pandora's Wonder......Page 49
2. Pandora and the Myth of Otherness......Page 61
From Mount Helicon to a Poetics of Otherness......Page 63
The Fantasy of Symbiosis between Men and Gods......Page 69
Ambiguities of Identity: The Case of Brothers
......Page 76
The Loss of Sameness and the Birth of Eros
......Page 81
The Didactic Imperative: Learn the Other
......Page 86
3. The Socratic Pandora......Page 89
Woman is the Ideal Listener
......Page 90
The Naked Truth and the Adorned Lie
......Page 94
The Seductions of Pandora
......Page 99
Socrates and Theodote
......Page 103
Socrates and Pandora......Page 109
Pandora's Voice......Page 116
From the Effeminate Elegy to the Feminine Text......Page 122
The Erotodidactic Persona
......Page 127
Sappho's Lasciviousness
......Page 133
The Lascivious Text
......Page 138
5. Feminine Subjectivity and the Self-Contradicting Text......Page 144
Ars and Remedia: Metadiscourse, Language Games, and the Problem of Sincerity
......Page 145
The Palinodic Structure
......Page 153
Palinode and Narrative......Page 155
Pandora's Lie
......Page 158
A Girl's Rape and the Birth of Feminine Subjectivity
......Page 163
Feminine Weaving: Text, Textile, Body, Pain
......Page 174
Helen's Web
......Page 178
Listening Like a Woman: Penelope's Tears
......Page 183
Odysseus Weeps Like a Woman
......Page 186
Xanthippe's Tears
......Page 189
Epilogue......Page 200
Notes......Page 204
Bibliography......Page 236
Index......Page 250
