This thesis offers a syncretic, synoptic account of Palamedes from the Trojan War. It delineates three interpretive modes: (1) that Palamedes was present all along; (2) that later poets inserted him into the Trojan narrative, either as an archetypal intellectual figure, or as Odysseus’s double; (3) that Palamedes was present only as Odysseus’s imaginary Doppelgänger. The thesis accounts for Palamedes’s scarce attention in classical texts by way of Lacanian and—via Otto Rank—Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as well as by Slavoj Žižek’s adoption of the “vanishing mediator.” After tracing a potential textual genealogy from Palamedes to Malory’s Palomydes, the thesis concludes with a reading of Palamedes’s implied presence in Inferno 26.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:digitalarchive.gsu.edu:english_theses-1111
Date27 April 2011
CreatorsCantrell, Paul A.
PublisherDigital Archive @ GSU
Source SetsGeorgia State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceEnglish Theses

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