Original scientific paper
Developed Similitudes in Judita / Judith: On Marulić’s Prilike (Extended Similes)
Ružica Pšihistal
orcid.org/0000-0002-7018-6328
; Filozofski fakultet, Osijek
Abstract
In the celebrated stylistic study of Skok (On the Style of Marulić’s Judita, 1950), exceptional attention is devoted to epic similes. In a detailed and systematic analysis, Skok picks out sixteen epic similes and describes the way they are made semantically and stylistically. Epic similes, along with periphrasis and purely descriptive sections, are in Skok’s opinion aesthetically the most valuable parts of Marulić’s Biblical epic because they contribute to the pictorial, which he picks out as the most important feature of Marulić’s style and the peak of his art as a poet. Although today too, after more than half a century, the good scholarly grounds of Skok’s study cannot be denied, as cannot his refined sense for stylistic values in the text or the author’s fundamental conclusions about the features of Marulić’s style, the results of a new reading do not entirely correlate with the results of Skok’s, both with respect to the final number of the epic similes present in Judita and their stylistic facture. Respecting other scholarly contributions in the analysis of stylistic figures of Judita (of Kasandrić, Šrepel, Gortan, Tomasović, Fališevac and Lučin), the issues raised by the current paper might in rough lines be reduced to several focal problems: • Which of the semantic implications of Marulić’s term prilika are borne out in the text of Judita? • What are the relations of the vehicle and the tenor of Marulić’s epic similes, to do with the order in which they appear, and the scope of their imaging material? • From the relations of the topic units of the vehicle and the tenor can any slippage of the epic similes in the direction of some other tropological modalities be observed?
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
23920
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2008.
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