Poetry as Neurosis: Lucan’s Bellum Civile

3 points · University catalogue

This course is an intensive study of Lucan’s revolutionary and enigmatic Bellum Civile, the epic masterpiece of the Neronian age, which was admired and imitated all through the history of Western culture by authors such as Dante, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Shelley, and Baudelaire among others. The course will examine major controversies concerning the form and meaning of the poem, with special emphasis on the poetic tension created by the narrator’s neurotic personality. The narration of the 49 BCE civil war between Caesar and Pompey is for Lucan the pretext for an original and intensely personal reflection on themes such as political oppression, the role of the individual in society, nihilism, self-destructiveness, mental disorder, and artistic creation. The poem will be analyzed from various critical perspectives that include rhetoric, intertextuality, deconstruction, reception theory, and psychoanalysis; no previous knowledge of any of these methodologies is required. Although an acceptable knowledge of Latin (intermediate or above) is assumed, the primary focus of this course is literary and sociological interpretation rather than linguistic competence. In addition to the Latin reading assignments, the poem will also be read entirely in English translation, allowing students to comprehend the whole while they engage with particular sections in the original language. The assignment for each class will include: (1) approximately five hundred lines to be read in English translation; (2) translation of short Latin passages, whose size may be adapted to the level of the class/student; (3) secondary readings.