Flip-flopping
Emily Wilson: Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic?, 17 November 2005
Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibitions, Cultural Crisis
by Theodore Ziolkowski.
Cornell, 163 pp., £17.50, March 2004,0 8014 4203 6 Show More
by Theodore Ziolkowski.
Cornell, 163 pp., £17.50, March 2004,
“... Most of us, it seems, tend to think of the ‘hero’ as someone who never hesitates. As soon as he has made up his mind, he acts. But in Hesitant Heroes Theodore Ziolkowski identifies texts central to the Western canon – the Oresteia, the Aeneid, Parzival, Hamlet, Wallenstein – which show heroes who hesitate at the moment of decision. He argues that each of these works uses the personal hesitation of a single character to represent a broad cultural crisis, a shift in values from one ethical or social norm to another ... ”