Content area
Full text
Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. By Evelyn Adkins. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2022. Pp. 211.
Defining discourse as "the use of various media of communication between two or more people to negotiate identity, status, and power, often by conveying the possession of superior or restricted knowledge," Evelyn Adkins's monograph analyzes the use of discourse in Apuleius' Metamorphoses "as a tool of social power" (20). On Adkins's reading, speech and silence function in Apuleius as instruments of self-representation and self-fashioning whose success and failure betray some of the fundamental aspirations and anxieties that characterize the second-century Greco-Roman culture. The Introduction, in which Adkins lays out the theoretical premises of her investigation, is followed by six chapters that focus on various aspects of how the novel stages tensions between the production and reception of discourse.
Chapter One discusses misunderstandings that surround two types of non-elite discourse-the language of the priests of Dea Syria, who cast themselves as women but come across as sexual deviants, and the language of the bandits, whose hypermasculine selfrepresentation forms a marked contrast to the comic failure of their mock-heroic exploits. Singling out oratory as the predominant elite discourse within Apuleius' contemporary culture, Chapter Two analyzes three rhetorical performances (the tale of Thelyphron in Book 2, Lucius' speech at the Festival of Laughter in Book 3, and the speech of the wise physician in Book 10) and interprets them as paradigmatic of how the novel as a whole frames discursive strategies in order to destabilize social status and truth. Along similar lines, Chapters Three and Four focus on Lucius' discursive self-fashioning and discuss the panoply of discourses to which he, with varying degrees of success,...