Karen Pinkus
“Hermaphrodite Poetics”
The figure of the hermaphrodite from Ovid's Metamorphoses reappears in the Renaissance alchemical tradition, initiated by the famous Hypnerotomachia poliphili (1499). In the latter, the hermaphrodite seems to be a mere fragmentary trope but represents much more than a biological being or a cipher of desire. An entire poetic mode, a mode of writing and thinking, characterizes alchemy and ambivalence. A reading of Francesco Colonna's “strife of love in a dream” can profit from Sarah Kofman's analysis of ambivalence, metals, and writing in key texts of Shakespeare and Freud. The hermaphrodite, as we learn, is a trope, and more than that: it opens up a poetics that exceeds the double-sexed creature itself.
Arcadia International Journal for Literary Studies, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0003-7982
Volume: 41, 07/2006
Pages: 91 - 111
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