Talya Meyers: "When is Camões Epic?"

Date
Tue January 28th 2014, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Location
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room

Speaker(s): Talya Meyers

 

"When Is Camões's Epic?”"is a condensed version of the first chapter of a dissertation called "Epic and Encounter: Form and Culture in Early Modern Narrative Poetry," which reconsiders the form of epic poetry and its relationship to romance in the context of early modern cultural, political, and commercial interactions between Europe and Africa, the Middle East, and Asia by exploring four early modern epic texts: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.  In this essay, I deal with the Os Lusíadas, a Portuguese epic poem published in 1572 that represents the voyage of Vasco da Gama and his crew to India, and which encloses its main narrative within a vast apparatus of past Portuguese history and prophecies of future Portuguese glory to come.  I argue that while the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India is a fragmented and wandering story about encountering new people and places, the past and future apparatus looks much more like a conventionally linear story of proto-colonialism and Portuguese victory.  These two narratives, one of encounter, one of conquest, exist at odds throughout the texts, providing us with two means of understanding and experiencing the collision of one culture with another.

 

Talya Meyers is a graduate student in English at Stanford University.  Her dissertation considers the role that early modern encounters play in the formation of epic narrative.  Her interests include narrative poetry and prose and representations of non-Europeans in European texts.  She is a 2013-2014 Lieberman Fellow.