Download or read book Two Faces of Oedipus written by Frederick Ahl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is the most famous of ancient tragedies and a literary masterpiece. It is not, however, the only classical dramatization of Oedipus' quest to discover his identity. Between four and five hundred years after Sophocles' play was first performed, Seneca composed a fine, but neglected and often disparaged Latin tragedy on the same subject, which, in some ways, comes closer to our common understanding of the Oedipus myth. Now, modern readers can compare the two versions, in new translations by Frederick Ahl.Balancing poetry and clarity, yet staying scrupulously close to the original texts, Ahl's English versions are designed to be both read and performed, and are alert to the literary and historical complexities of each. In approaching Sophocles anew, Ahl is careful to preserve the richly allusive nature and rhetorical power of the Greek, including the intricate use of language that gives the original its brilliant force. For Ahl, Seneca's tragedy is vastly and intriguingly different from that of Sophocles, and a poetic masterpiece in its own right. Seneca takes us inside the mind of Oedipus in ways that Sophocles does not, making his inner conflicts a major part of the drama itself in his soliloquies and asides. Two Faces of Oedipus opens with a wide-ranging introduction that examines the conflicting traditions of Oedipus in Greek literature, the different theatrical worlds of Sophocles and Seneca, and how cultural and political differences between Athenian democracy and Roman imperial rule affect the nature and conditions under which the two tragedies were composed. This book brings two dramatic traditions into conversation while providing elegant, accurate, and exciting new versions of Sophocles' and Seneca's tragedies.
Download or read book Oedipus the King written by Sophocles and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the outset of the play, Oedipus is the beloved ruler of the city of Thebes, whose citizens have been stricken by a plague. Consulting the Delphic oracle, Oedipus is told that the plague will cease only when the murderer of Queen Jocasta's first husband, King Laius, has been found and punished for his deed. Oedipus resolves to find Laius's killer. His investigation turns into an obsessive reconstruction of his own hidden past when he discovers that the old man he killed when he first approached Thebes as a youth was none other than Laius. At the end, Jocasta hangs herself in shame, and the guilt-stricken Oedipus blinds himself.
Download or read book The Darker Face of the Earth written by Rita Dove and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove's first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.
Download or read book Oedipus and the Sphinx written by Almut-Barbara Renger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle—he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture’s central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and dangerous realm where rules and limits are not known—Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a fresh account of this mythic encounter and how it deals with the concepts of liminality and otherness. Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story’s meanings and functions in classical antiquity—from its presence in ancient vase painting to its absence in Sophocles’s tragedy—before arriving at two of its major reworkings in European modernity: the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. Through her readings, she highlights the ambiguous status of the Sphinx and reveals Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, providing key insights into Sophocles’s portrayal and establishing a theoretical framework that organizes evaluations of the myth’s reception in the twentieth century. Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition experienced by all of humankind, Renger situates myth between the competing claims of science and art in an engagement that has important implications for current debates in literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural history, and aesthetics.
Download or read book Seneca s Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime written by Alessandra Zanobi and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pantomime was arguably the most popular dramatic genre during the Roman Empire, but has been relatively neglected by literary critics. Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime adds to our understanding of Seneca's tragic art by demonstrating that elements which have long puzzled scholars can be attributed to the influence of pantomime. The work argues that certain formal features which depart from the conventions of fifth-century Attic drama can be explained by the influence of, and interaction with, this more popular genre. The work includes a detailed and systematic analysis of the specific pantomime-inspired features of Seneca's tragedies: the loose dramatic structure, the presence of “running commentaries” (minute descriptions of characters undergoing emotional strains or performing specific actions), of monologues of self-analysis, and of narrative set-pieces. Relevant to the culture of Roman imperial culture more generally, Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime includes an outline of the general features of pantomime as a genre. The work shows that the influence of sub-literary-genres such as pantomime and mime, the sister art of pantomime, can be traced in several Roman writers whose literary production was antecedent or contemporary with Seneca's. Furthermore, the work sheds light on the interaction between sub-literary genres of a performative nature such as mime and pantomime and more literary ones, an aspect of Latin culture which previous scholarship has tended to overlook. Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime provides an original contribution to the understanding of the impact of pantomime on Roman literary culture and of controversial and little-understood features of Senecan tragedies.
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 385 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 The Passage of Literature written by Christopher GoGwilt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship. This study nimbly traces a trio of distinct yet interrelated modernist genealogies. English modernism as exemplified by Conrad's Malay trilogy is productively paired with the hallmark work of Indonesian modernism, Pramoedya's Buru quartet. The two novel sequences, penned years apart, narrate overlapping histories of imperialism in the Dutch East Indies, and both make opera central for understanding the cultural dynamic of colonial power. Creole modernism--defined not only by the linguistic diversity of the Caribbean but also by an alternative vision of literary history--provides a transnational context for reading Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea, each novel mapped in relation to the colonial English and postcolonial Indonesian coordinates of Conrad's The Shadow-Line and Pramoedya's This Earth of Mankind. All three modernisms-English, Creole, and Indonesian-converge in a discussion of the Indonesian figure of the nyai, a concubine or house servant, who represents the traumatic core of transnational modernism. Throughout the study, Pramoedya's extraordinary effort to reconstruct the lost record of Indonesia's emergence as a nation provides a model for reading each fragmentary passage of literature as part of an ongoing process of decolonizing tradition. Drawing on translated and un-translated works of fiction and nonfiction, GoGwilt effectively reexamines the roots of Anglophone modernist studies, thereby laying out the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology even as he resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.
Download or read book A Certain Realism written by Maurizio Viano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1993-07-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was arguably the most complex director of postwar Italian cinema. His films—Accattone, The Canterbury Tales, Medea, Saló—continue to challenge and entertain new generations of moviegoers. A leftist, a homosexual, and a distinguished writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Pasolini once claimed that "a certain realism" informed his filmmaking. Masterfully combining analyses of Pasolini's literary and theoretical writings and of all his films, Maurizio Viano offers the first thorough study of Pasolini's cinematic realism, in theory and in practice. He finds that Pasolini's cinematic career exemplifies an "expressionistic realism" that acknowledges its subjective foundation instead of striving for an impossible objectivity. Focusing on the personal and expressionistic dimensions of Pasolini's cinema, Viano also argues that homosexuality is present in the films in ways that critics have thus far failed to acknowledge. Sure to generate controversy among film scholars, Italianists, and fans of the director's work, this accessible film-by-film treatment is an ideal companion for anyone watching Pasolini's films on video.
Download or read book Sophocles and Alcibiades written by Michael Vickers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist, Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. In this book, Michael Vickers challenges this view and argues that Sophocles makes regular and extensive allusion to Athenian politics in his plays, especially to Alcibiades, one of the most controversial Athenian politicians of his day.Vickers shows that Sophocles was no closeted intellectual but a man deeply involved in politics and he reminds us that Athenian politics was intensely personal. He argues cogently that classical writers employed hidden meanings and that consciously or sub-consciously, Sophocles was projecting onto his plays hints of contemporary events or incidents, mostly of a political nature, hoping that his audience's passion for politics would enhance the popularity of his plays. Vickers strengthens his case about Sophocles by discussing other authors - Thucydides, Plato and Euripides - in whom he also demonstrates a body of allusions to Alcibiades and others.
Download or read book Each One Another written by Rachel Haidu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consideration of how contemporary art can offer a deeper understanding of selfhood. With Each One Another, Rachel Haidu argues that contemporary art can teach us how to understand ourselves as selves—how we come to feel oneness, to sense our own interiority, and to shift between the roles that connect us to strangers, those close to us, and past and future generations. Haidu looks to intergenerational pairings of artists to consider how three aesthetic vehicles––shape in painting, characters in film and video, and roles in dance––allow us to grasp selfhood. Better understandings of our selves, she argues, complement our thinking about identity and subjecthood. She shows how Philip Guston’s figurative works explore shapes’ descriptive capacities and their ability to investigate history, while Amy Sillman’s paintings allow us to rethink expressivity and oneness. Analyzing a 2004 video by James Coleman, Haidu explores how we enter characters through their interior monologues, and she also looks at how a 2011 film by Steve McQueen positions a protagonist’s refusal to speak as an argument for our right to silence. In addition, Haidu examines how Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s distribution of roles across dancers invites us to appreciate formal structures that separate us from one another while Yvonne Rainer’s choreography shows how such formal structures also bring us together. Through these examples, Each One Another reveals how artworks allow us to understand oneness, interiority, and how we become fluid agents in the world, and it invites us to examine—critically and forgivingly—our attachments to selfhood.
Download or read book Let Them Rot written by Alenka Zupančič and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture. There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular “obsessions” have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic” as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and “second death.” The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: “What is incest?” Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.
Download or read book Oedipus written by Derek Mahon and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pairing 'King Oedipus' and 'Oedipus at Colonus' creates a single play unified by the arc of the hero's tragic fate.
Download or read book Understanding Kristeva Understanding Modernism written by Maria Margaroni and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julia Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by developing a theoretical approach that is uniquely attuned to the dynamic interplay between, on the one hand, linguistic and formal experimentation, and, on the other hand, subjective crisis and socio-political upheaval. Inspired by the contestatory spirit of the late 1960s in which she emerged as a theorist, Kristeva has defended the project of the European avant-gardes and has systematically attempted to reclaim their legacy in the new societal structures produced by a global, spectacle-dominated capitalism. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism brings together essays that take up the threads in Kristeva's analyses of the avant-garde, offering an appreciation of her overall contribution, the intellectual and political horizon within which she has produced her seminal works as well as of the blind spots that need to be acknowledged in any contemporary examination of her insights. As with other volumes in this series, this volume is structured in three parts. The first part provides new readings of key texts or central aspects in Kristeva's oeuvre. The second part takes up the task of showing the impact of Kristeva's thought on the appreciation of modernist concerns and strategies in a variety of fields: literature, philosophy, the visual arts, and dance. The third part is a glossary of some of Kristeva's key terms, with each entry written by an expert contributor.
Download or read book Favorite Greek Myths written by Bob Blaisdell and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventures, calamities, and conquests abound in stirring tales about Pandora's box, King Midas and his golden touch, the dreaded Cyclops, Narcissus and Echo, and many other familiar figures.
Download or read book The Oedipus Casebook written by Mark R. Anspach and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play’s end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics including Walter Burkert, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves. The Greek word for tragedy means “goat song.” Is Oedipus the goat? Helene Peet Foley calls him “the kind of leader a democracy would both love and desire to ostracize.” The Oedipus Casebook readings weigh the evidence against Oedipus, place the play in the context of Greek scapegoat rites, and explore the origins of tragedy in the festival of Dionysus. This unique critical edition includes a new translation of the play by distinguished classics scholar Wm. Blake Tyrrell and the authoritative Greek text established by H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson.
Download or read book The Modernist Madonna written by Jane Silverman Van Buren and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Van Buren's analysis centres on the history of the evolving maternal signifiers presented in the artists' works. She peels away layer after layer of images to uncover the meanings contained in the artistic texts. The maternal metaphor is scrutinized through the lenses of semiological, psychological, psychoanalytic and historical insights.
Download or read book The Virginia Quarterly Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
