| Given the numerous and popular "moralizations" of Ovid's Metamorphoses during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the literary use of Ovid's Narcissus myth in these periods has been largely interpreted as a Neo-Platonic validation of hierarchical order and the self-sufficiency of the divine, rational subject. This "subject-centered" approach, however, in which past theories of human nature, reality, and self-knowledge are taken at face value, has been heavily criticized in recent years, especially among New Historicists. To counteract the bias of assuming a Platonic "autonomy of self," New Historicists in their readings of the myth typically emphasize an Ovidian eroticism or linguistic "metamorphosis" that radically disrupts the stability of social order and the rational subject. Often these critics view the "pre-modern" literary use of Ovid's Narcissus myth as an anticipation of the postmodern conviction that reality is a play of language, empty at the core.;Drawing on Habermas's speech act theory of communicative action, this dissertation offers an understanding of subjectivity that differs from both a "philosophy of unified consciousness" and a "theory of autonomous discourse." In this speech act approach, the subject is defined in terms of social interaction and intersubjective agreement with other subjects, not in terms of solitary self-reflective unity or objectifying strategic domination. Rather than an unassailable (Platonic) unity of the self or the (Foucauldian) autonomy of a "disembodied" voice, the Echo and Narcissus myth dramatizes the classical concept of "self-cultivation," a reciprocal exercise of virtue with others in the formation and maintenance of personal and national identity. Allusions to this critical demand for intersubjective mutuality in Ovid's Narcissus myth contribute to a critique and redefinition of the self-sufficient epic hero in Shakespeare's epyllia, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in his play Troilus and Cressida, and in Milton's Paradise Lost. |
