Tag Archives: poetics

The Anger of Achilles

The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic by Leonard Muellner, a 1995 paperback in the Myth and Poetics series edited by Gregory Nagy from Cornell University Press, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.

Leonard Muellner The Anger of Achilles from Cornell University Press

“Leonard Muellner’s goal is to restore the Greek word for the anger of Achilles, mênis, to its social, mythical, and poetic contexts. His point of departure is the anthropology of emotions. He believes that notions of anger vary between cultures and that the particular meaning of a word such as mênis needs to emerge from a close study of Greek epic. Mênis means more than an individual’s emotional response. on the basis of the epic exemplifications of the word, Muellner defines the term as a cosmic sanction against behavior that violates the most basic rules of human society. To understand the way mênis functions, Muellner stresses both the power and the danger that accrue to a person who violates such rules. Transgressive behavior has both a creative and destructive aspect.” — back cover

“Rather than speak of conspiracy theory we might instead try to construct a poetics of conspiracy. A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text. Robert Anton Wilson has done this with his vast and playful ‘Illuminati’ fantasy. We can also use conspiracy theory as a weapon of agit-prop.” The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory by Hakim Bey

“Language itself is haunted by the (sometimes unintentional) poetics of its own self-overcoming, by the subversive, the ‘erruption of the marvellous’. Life seems to conspire with this outsideness, such that even representation finally escapes representation.” Millennium – Hakim Bey