Untimely Epic: Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica

Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica is a voyage across time as well as space. The Argonauts encounter monsters, nymphs, shepherds, and kings who represent earlier stages of the cosmos or human society; they are given glimpses into the future, and themselves effect changes in the world through which they travel. Readers undergo a still more complex form of temporal transport, enabled not just to imagine themselves into the deep past, but to examine the layers of poetic and intellectual history from which Apollonius crafts his poem. Taking its lead from ancient critical preoccupations with poetry's ethical significance, this volume argues that the Argonautica produces an understanding of time and temporal experience which ramifies variously in readers' lives. When describing the people and creatures who occupied the past, Apollonius extends readers' capacity for empathetic response to the worlds inhabited by others. In the ecphrasis of Jason's cloak and the account of Jason's conversations with Medea, readers are invited to scrutinize the relationship between exempla and temporal change, while episodes such as the taking of the Golden Fleece explore links between perceptions and their temporal situation. Running through the poem, and through the readings that comprise this book, is an attention to the intellectual potential of the 'untimely' DL objects, experience, and language which do not belong straightforwardly to a particular time. Treatment of such phenomena is crucial to the poem's aspiration to inform and expand readers' understanding of themselves as subjects in and of history.

Table of Contents:
Introduction I. Vocabularies II. Textual Performances III. Form and Fashioning IV. The Cosmic and the Momentary 1: Affecting Time I. The Text in Time I.1. New Beginnings I.2. Homer's Pasts I.3. Heracles and the Multitemporal II. Intertexts, Intentions, and Acknowledgement II.1. Metapoetics, Affect, Speculation II.2. Poetry and Philology II.3. Pensiveness II.4. The Life of the Author II.5. Exultation III. Conclusions 2: Untimely Performances I. Thynias: Epiphany, Song, Ritual I.1. Genre and Context I.2. Thematics and Exemplarity I.3. The Poetics of Presence II. The Heliades: Primordial Lament II.1. Primordial Sound II.2. Presence, Empathy, Finitude II.3. Multitemporality III. The Sirens Unheard: Time, Expressivity, Voicing III.1. Situating the Sirens III.2. Allusivity III.3. Soundscape, Meaning, Voice III.4. Voicing Untimeliness III.5. An Ethics of Absorption IV. Conclusions 3: Past Encounters I. A Gathering of Wisdom II. Dipsacus III. Archaeologies of Perception IV. Circe's Beasts, Orpheus' Cosmogony V. Between the Windows of the Sea V.1. Luminously Peopled V.2. The Facts Were Known VI. Reading Rituals VI.1. Dindymum VI.2. Idmon's Tomb VI.3. The Black Rock VI.4. Anaphe VII. The Hesperides VIII. Conclusions 4: Exemplarity, Ethics, Narrative I. Jason's Cloak I.1. Exemplifying Exemplarity I.2. Ecphrasis and the Universal I.3. Picturing Time II. Jason, Medea, and Ariadne II.1. Time Out of Joint II.2. The Colour of Stars II.3. Desire and Reflection II.4. Gesture II.5. Heavy Misfortunes III. Conclusions 5: Imagined Worlds I. Worlds Imagined II. Aeetes III. The Bulls IV. The Earthborn V. The Golden Fleece V.1. A Special Way of Being Afraid V.2. Answerable Style VI. Conclusions 6: Conclusion

About the Author :
Following graduate work at the University of Oxford, Tom Phillips was a Junior Research Fellow and then a Supernumerary Fellow at Merton College. He moved to the University of Manchester in September 2018 where he is currently Lecturer in Classical Literature. His research focuses on archaic and classical lyric, Hellenistic poetry, and ancient scholarly culture.

Review :
This book presents us with an Argonautica that is fresh and different from the poem other critics have described, and it opens up new and promising ways of thinking about this complex work. Although his approach is in many respects formalist, P. goes beyond past formalist studies, and he discusses temporality in a distinctive way that departs from recent historicising readings, to reveal the many ways in which the Argonautica is productively 'untimely'. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. This is a sensitive and thoroughly researched approach ... Phillips' readings of such passages are learned, sensitive to Apollonius' contexts, and compelling in their own right.