| This dissertation maintains a double focus on Vergil's Aeneid , and on basic (and perhaps unanswerable) questions about reading fiction. Chapter 2, which provides the framework for the whole enquiry, examines the fury Allecto's inflammation of Turnus and Amata in Aeneid 7. I compare this with the transformation experienced by readers of fiction. I explore the intricate connections between Allecto's attempt to influence Turnus through her words and appearance (first in disguise, then in her self-revelation), and her willingness to use the brute force of her divine power to drive him mad. Turnus' madness shifts the way he knows the world: he loses control of his powers of understanding through Allecto's divine wielding of both violence and rhetoric. After failing to achieve her aims through disguise, Allecto reveals herself terrifyingly to Turnus, and it is hard to tell how far his madness comes from the revelation itself, how far from an attack by the fury's torch. However Allecto's work on Amata offers another way to consider readers' experience: instead of being attacked, Amata's perceptions are transformed when a snake from Allecto's hair metamorphoses itself into various personal objects so familiar that Amata does not notice that anything is happening. This loss of control by Amata and Turnus resembles the almost imperceptible ways in which novel readers cede control over their perception, yielding to the fascination exerted by stories.;The remaining chapters analyze how mortals within the poem (such as Aeneas, Turnus, and the Rutulians) use their previous knowledge to acquire new knowledge when they interpret artwork or omens; this process makes them vulnerable to manipulation by gods (such as Juno, Juturna, and Venus). A second level of enquiry arises from my analogy between the way readers' perceptions are shaped by narrative and the way mortal perceptions are controlled by gods. If the structures of our knowledge as readers are shaped partly imperceptibly by our literary experience, how are we to interpret texts originating from widely distant cultures? How are we to decide what it means to read anachronistically?... |
