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- Title
“Hermaphrodite Poetics”.
- Authors
Pinkus, Karen
- Abstract
The figure of the hermaphrodite from Ovid's Metamorphoses reappears in the Renaissance alchemical tradition, initiated by the famous Hypnerotomachia poliphili (1499). In the latter, the hermaphrodite seems to be a mere fragmentary trope but represents much more than a biological being or a cipher of desire. An entire poetic mode, a mode of writing and thinking, characterizes alchemy and ambivalence. A reading of Francesco Colonna's “strife of love in a dream” can profit from Sarah Kofman's analysis of ambivalence, metals, and writing in key texts of Shakespeare and Freud. The hermaphrodite, as we learn, is a trope, and more than that: it opens up a poetics that exceeds the double-sexed creature itself.
- Subjects
RENAISSANCE; INTERSEX people; FIGURES of speech; AMBIVALENCE; SHAKESPEARE, William, 1564-1616; FREUD, Sigmund, 1856-1939; COLONNA, Francesco, d. 1527
- Publication
Arcadia -- International Journal for Literary Studies, 2006, Vol 41, Issue 1, p91
- ISSN
0003-7982
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1515/ARCA.2006.008