Download or read book Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy written by C. Fred Alford and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1992-10-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalytic readings of literature are often reductionist, seeking to find in great works of the past support for current psychoanalytic tenets. In this book C. Fred Alford begins with the possibility that the insights into human needs and aspirations contained in Greek tragedy might be more profound than psychoanalytic theory. He offers his own psychoanalytic interpretation of the tragedies, one that reconstructs the dramatists' views of the world and, when necessary, enlarges psychoanalysis to take these views into account. Alford draws on an eclectic mixture of psychoanalytic theories--in particular the work of Melanie Klein, Robert Jay Lifton, and Jacques Lacan--to help him illuminate the concerns of the Greek poets. He discusses not only well-known tragedies, such as Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles' Theban plays, and Euripides' Medea and Bacchae, but also lesser-known works, such as Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' so-called romantic comedies. Alford examines the fundamental concerns of the tragedies: how to live in a world in which justice and power often seem to have nothing to do with each other; how to confront death; how to deal with the fear that our aggression will overflow and violate all that we care about; how to make this inhumane world a more human place. Two assumptions of the tragic poets could, he argues, enrich psychoanalysis--that people are responsible without being free, and that pity is the most civilizing connection. The poets understood these things, Alford believes, because they never flinched in the face of the suffering and constraint that are at the center of human existence.
Download or read book Freudian Mythologies written by Rachel Bowlby and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-02-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfilment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex - child, mother, father - suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible—'a likely story!'—have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story. This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies - Oedipus and others - which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands of his stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.
Download or read book The Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy written by C. Fred Alford and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alford begins with the possibility that the insights into human needs and aspirations contained in Greek tragedy might be more profound than psychoanalytic theory. He offers his own psychoanalytic interpretation of the tragedies, one that reconstructs the dramatists' views of the world.
Download or read book Interpreting Greek Tragedy written by Charles Segal and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This generous selection of published essays by the distinguished classicist Charles Segal represents over twenty years of critical inquiry into the questions of what Greek tragedy is and what it means for modern-day readers. Taken together, the essays reflect profound changes in the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period-in particular, the increasing emphasis on myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and semiotics.
Download or read book Tragedy and Otherness written by Nicholas Ray and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new account of the complex relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the key tragic dramas by Sophocles and Shakespeare in which it has often sought exemplars and prototypes. Examining the close historical and theoretical connections between Freud's interpretative appeal to tragic drama and his professed abandonment of the 'seduction' hypothesis in 1897, the author explores the ways in which otherness has subsequently been simplified out of both psychoanalytic theory and the dramatic texts it endeavours to comprehend. Drawing on Jean Laplanche's critical reformulation of the seduction theory, the book offers close rereadings of Oedipus Tyrannus, Julius Caesar and Hamlet in order to outline an approach to tragedy which takes account of the constitutive priority of the other in the itinerary of the tragic subject. By reopening the theme of seduction in relation to these key literary dramas, the book aims to generate a better understanding both of the function which psychoanalysis has called upon tragedy to perform, and the radical modes of otherness within tragedy for which psychoanalysis has hitherto remained unable to account.
Download or read book Greek Tragedy written by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greek Tragedy sets ancient tragedy into its original theatrical, political and ritual context and applies modern critical approaches to understanding why tragedy continues to interest modern audiences. An engaging introduction to Greek tragedy, its history, and its reception in the contemporary world with suggested readings for further study Examines tragedy’s relationship to democracy, religion, and myth Explores contemporary approaches to scholarship, including structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory Provides a thorough examination of contemporary performance practices Includes detailed readings of selected plays
Download or read book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples written by Miguel de Unamuno and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 1500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Tragic Effect written by André Green and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating and wide-ranging 1979 study, André Green demonstrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to literary criticism.
Download or read book Archive Feelings written by Mario Telò and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using classic Greek texts and modern theory, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.
Download or read book Intimate Commerce written by Victoria Wohl and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy—and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous? Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.
Download or read book Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge written by Sarah Winter and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining approaches from literary studies and historical sociology, this book provides a groundbreaking cultural history of the strategies Freud employed in his writings and career to orchestrate public recognition of psychoanalysis and to shape its institutional identity.
Download or read book Freudian Mythologies written by Northcliffe Professor of English Rachel Bowlby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-22 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Bowlby suggests that, with the multiplication of sexual roles, family forms, and reproductive technologies, Freud's 'Oedipus complex' may have lost its relevance. This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the entanglements of identity.
Download or read book Tragedy written by Richard Kuhns and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation, Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that have dominated modern discussions. From Aeschylus' classic drama The Persians to the hidden tragic themes in The Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. The study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.
Download or read book Affect Theory Genre and the Example of Tragedy written by Duncan A. Lucas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy employs Silvan Tomkins’ Affect-Script theory of human psychology to explore the largely unacknowledged emotions of disgust and shame in tragedy. The book begins with an overview of Tomkins’ relationship to both traditional psychoanalysis and theories of human motivation and emotion, before considering tragedy via case studies of Oedipus, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman. Aligning Affect-Script theory with literary genre studies, this text explores what motivates fictional characters within the closed conditions of their imagined worlds and how we as an audience relate to and understand fictional characters as motivated humans.
Download or read book Mirror to Nature written by Margaret Rustin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on drama in the western dramatic tradition. Plays which are discussed in detail include works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, and Beckett among others. The authors seek to show that the subtle understanding of conscious and unconscious emotions achieved by psychoanalytic practice can bring new ways of understanding classic works of drama. The argument of the book, set out in its introduction and exemplified in its discussion of individual dramatists and plays, is that western drama has represented the central tensions of societies as crises in the relationships of gender and generation, through dramatic explorations of the inner life of families. This is the common theme which links the book's analysis of Medea, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream amongst others. The value of this book lies in the originality of its analysis of individual plays, and the subtlety with which it brings psychoanalytic and sociological insights together.
Download or read book The Theater of War written by Bryan Doerries and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.
Download or read book Greek Theatre Performance written by David Wiles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-25 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Specially written for students and enthusiasts, David Wiles introduces ancient Greek theatre and cultural life.
