Pires Da Silva, Mélissa;
(2025)
The ‘Family’ in Jean Giraudoux’s La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu and
Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil: Homeric and Virgilian receptions.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis investigates the significance of family in Jean Giraudoux’s and Hermann Broch’s receptions of the Homeric and Virgilian epics in La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu and Der Tod des Vergil. Family, I argue, becomes a crucial layered paradigm which helps Giraudoux and Broch express ancient and modern reflections about a) leadership politics, b) cultural heritage and c) human agency. Jean Giraudoux stages the Homeric family - in its capacity as oikos but also as a Greek laos - as a distinct community politics able to accommodate the simultaneous co-existence of one mass consciousness and singular, heterogeneous political agents. As such, the Homeric family becomes a useful model for testing distinct forms of political leadership under one same national roof; an invaluable political experiment in 1935 given the tabula rasa caused by the First World War. In 1945, Hermann Broch applies a similar pressure on heterogeneity in his reception of Virgil’s Roman familia in Der Tod des Vergil. Broch revisits Virgil’s Roman family portrait in the Aeneid only to explode the patrilineal forms of authority that govern it, for the sake of establishing a more horizontal, class-conscious model of literary cultural heritage. Finally, after two chapters, one on each author's reception method, the final chapter of this study brings Broch and Giraudoux together in a summative, comparative analysis which interrogates why they both might have invested in the topos of the family in the first place. Family, I contend, proves to be a helpful hermeneutic tool in deconstructing the political and cultural impulses of Broch’s and Giraudoux’s characters because it forms an inherent narratological part in these authors’ attempt to retrace an aetiology of human agency from antiquity to modernity.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The ‘Family’ in Jean Giraudoux’s La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu and Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil: Homeric and Virgilian receptions |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Greek and Latin |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10218069 |
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