Date of Award
Spring 4-27-2011
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Murray Brown
Second Advisor
Stephen Dobranski
Third Advisor
Christopher Kocela
Fourth Advisor
Scott Lightsey
Abstract
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/1958805
Recommended Citation
Cantrell, Paul A., "Palamedes." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/1958805