The Ends of Mourning

The Ends of Mourning
Author: Alessia Ricciardi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804747776

The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace. The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust, and Freud's successor Lacan. Freud's idea of "sorrow work" and Proust's concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.

Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus
Author: Adrian Kelly
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2013-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147251971X

In his final play, Sophocles returns to the ever-popular character of Oedipus, the blind outcast of Thebes, the ultimate symbol of human reversal, whose fall he had so memorably treated in the 'Oedipus Tyrannus'. In this play, Sophocles brings the aged Oedipus to Athens, where he seeks succour and finds refuge, despite the threatening arrival of his kinsman Creon, who tries to tempt and then force the old man back under Theban control. Oedipus' resistance shows a fierceness in no way dimmed by incapacity, but he also refuses to aid his repentant son, Polyneices, in his coming attack on Thebes, manifesting once more the passion and harshness which mark his character so thoroughly. His mysterious death at the end of the play, witnessed only by Theseus himself, seems the sole fitting end for such an exceptional and problematic figure, transforming Oedipus into one of the 'powerful dead' whose beneficence towards Athens heralds a positive future for the city. This useful companion provides background, context, a synopsis and detailed analysis of the play.

Crossroads in the Black Aegean

Crossroads in the Black Aegean
Author: Barbara Goff
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2007-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199217181

A study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy, this title asks why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle are so often adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past can articulate the postcolonial moment.

Beyond the Fifth Century

Beyond the Fifth Century
Author: Ingo Gildenhard
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2010-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110223783

Beyond the Fifth Century brings together 13 scholars from various disciplines (Classics, Ancient History, Mediaeval Studies) to explore interactions with Greek tragedy from the 4th century BCE up to the Middle Ages. The volume breaks new ground in several ways. Its chronological scope encompasses periods that are not usually part of research on tragedy reception, especially the Hellenistic period, late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The volume also considers not just performance reception but various other modes of reception, between different literary genres and media (inscriptions, vase paintings, recording technology). There is a pervasive interest in interactions between tragedy and society-at-large, such as festival culture and entertainment (both public and private), education, religious practice, even life-style. Finally, the volume features studies of a comparative nature which focus less on genealogical connections (although such may be present) but rather on the study of equivalences.

Antiquities Beyond Humanism

Antiquities Beyond Humanism
Author: Emanuela Bianchi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198805675

"Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. 0'Antiquities beyond Humanism' seeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world, while other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - poetry, political theory, medicine - extend into the realms of plant, animal, and even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the ancient non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, ecological networks and non-human communities, voice, eros, and the ethics and the politics of posthumanism, the volume demonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as physical, psychical, divine, or cosmic."--

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight
Author: Shoshana Felman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1987
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780674471214

Felman analyzes Lacan's investigation of psychoanalysis not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery. By focusing on Lacan's singular way of making Freud's thought new again, Felman shows how this moment of illumination has become crucial to contemporary thinking and has redefined insight as such.

Beyond the Boundaries

Beyond the Boundaries
Author: Theodore Shank
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780472085354

An update of this popular history of experimental American theater

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
Author: Maud Ellmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317896777

This collection of essays provides students of literary critical theory with an introduction to Freudian methods of interpretation, and shows how those methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. It explains how classical Freudian criticism tended to focus on the thematic content of the literary text, whereas Lacanian criticism focuses on its linguistic structure, redirecting the reader to the words themselves. Concepts and methods are defined by tracing the role played by the drama of Oedipus in the development of psychoanalytic theory and criticism. The essays cover a wide generic scope and are divided into three parts: drama, narrative and poetry. Each is accompanied by explanatory headnotes giving clear definitions of complex terms.

Lacanian Coordinates

Lacanian Coordinates
Author: Bogdan Wolf
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2018-03-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429915519

Psychoanalysis is an experience of truths and lies in language. It is also a discourse, and a praxis. Lacanian Coordinates takes the reader from the beginning of Lacan's teaching, from the logic of the signifier and the Lacanian subject, to the drive and object a, qua object a, the paradoxes of guilt, and finally to the desire of the Other, love, and femininity - the themes which are explored and developed in the forthcoming second volume of Lacanian Coordinates. This book explores the points of Lacanian orientation that lead us to the particularity of the subject, and considers whether we find them not solely in the discourse of the universal, to which religion, science and philosophy testify, but also in the analytic experience itself. Psychoanalysis creates conditions for an encounter with an analyst and with words forgotten, neglected, underestimated, yet also bursting with meaning and surprises. Each chapter contributes to this subjective realisation, taking as reference the clinic, the voice of an analysand, and everyday discourse.