Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric
  • Silence, Subversion, and Sexual Heterodoxy
  • David Townsend
  • Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • This book reflects on what medieval Latin authors don't say about the sex nobody had-or maybe some had-and about how they don't say it. Their silences are artfully constructed, according to a rhetorical tradition reaching back to classical practice and theory. The strategy of preterition calls attention to something scandalous precisely by claiming to pass over it. Because it gestures toward what's missing from the text itself, it epitomizes a destabilizing reliance on audience reaction that informs the whole of classical rhetoric's technology of persuasion. Medieval Latin preterition invites our growing awareness, when we attend to it closely, that silence is not single, but that silences are multiple. Their multiplicity consists not in what preterition is, but in what it does. Preterition's multiple silences enabled subversive interpretations by individuals and communities marginalized under dominant regimes of sexuality-as they still do today.

  • Chapter 3 - The Deadly Play of Speech and Silence in Apollonius of Tyre

  • David Townsend, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric
    Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023, pp 72-94

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the romance of Apollonius of Tyre, a late antique text that is perhaps the successor of a lost Hellenistic original. At the very outset of that work—whose Nachleben extends from a fragmentary eleventh-century Old English translation, through Gower’s Confessio Amantis, to the Shakespearean Pericles, Prince of Tyre—circumlocution of the incestuous rape that sets the plot in motion structures the entire narrative around a double bind of desire that cannot be named but is signified in the silences that continually call the reader’s attention to it. Preterition is both repeatedly performed by the characters themselves and governs the entire work as a kind of master narratological trope, akin to the unconscious logic of dreams as understood by Freud and Lacan.