Recursive Desire: Rereading Epic Poetry

Epic has often been seen as a dead genre, intrinsically
patriarchal and nationalistic. Furthermore, the psychological model most
frequently applied to the relations between poets has been a violent one--the
Freudian masterplot of Oedipus slaying the father to possess the mother.
The limited usefulness of such simplistic explanations of epic is readily
apparent when confronted with the continuing production of epic poetry
long after its so-called death; when confronted with the contemporary drive
toward epic among women poets, people of color, and postcolonial poets;
and when faced with epic's fundamentally recursive desire--obvious in oral
epic, but common to the entire genre--to repeat rather than to kill or
evade its precursors.

Recursive desire, rooted in more basic preoedipal negotiations
of union and separation rather than in Oedipal conflict, provides an elegant
and far more useful explanation. By rereading and substantially redefining
epic in this way, this book recognizes and reinvests with meaning the vital
recursive qualities of the genre. Examining a diverse array of texts from
the Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's Osmeros, from the Homeric epics
to H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. The book develops a broadened, inclusive, and
living tradition of epic poetry, demonstrating the continuities of that
tradition across dramatic discontinuities in time, place, worldview, and
technology.

Recursive Desire rereads epic tradition and specific
epic poems in ways that challenge traditional notions of the genre and
open up unexplored fields of endeavor to students of epic, of poetry, and
of narrative. With its more powerful and comprehensive psychological model
of poetic relations, the book provides readers with a new understanding
of epic poetry and its vital, shifting, polyvocal array (and disarray)
of textual forces.