AMERICA DREAMING is a collection of distinctive plays by playwright Chiori Miyagawa with an introduction by dramaurge Emily Morse that illuminates a unique theatrical vision of how America dreams itself anew.
ANTIGONE PROJECT is a play in five parts by Tanya Barfield, Karen Hartman, Chiori Miyagawa, 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, and Caridad Svich that reconsiders the story of Antigone from a variety of rich and radical perspectives. With a preface by dramatist Lisa Schlesinger and an introduction by classics scholar Marianne McDonald, this is a unique addition to contemporary drama.
Natalie Roman isn’t much for the spotlight. But performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a stately old theatre in Savannah, Georgia, beats sitting alone replaying mistakes made in Athens. Fairy queens and magic on stage, maybe a few scary stories backstage. And no one in the cast knows her backstory. Except for Lucas—he was in the psych ward, too. He won’t even meet her eye. But Nat doesn’t need him. She’s making friends with girls, girls who like horror movies and Ouija boards, who can hide their liquor in Coke bottles and laugh at the theater’s ghosts. Natalie can keep up. She can adapt. And if she skips her meds once or twice so they don’t interfere with her partying, it won’t be a problem. She just needs to keep her wits about her. Honest, nuanced, and bittersweet, The Form of Things Unknown explores the shadows that haunt even the truest hearts . . . and the sparks that set them free.
Antigone Kefala is one of the most significant of the Australian writers who have come from elsewhere; it would be difficult to overstate the significance of her life and work in the culture of this nation. Over the last half-century, her poetry and prose have reshaped and expanded Australian literature and prompted us to re-examine its premises and capacities. From the force of her poetic imagery and the cadences of her phrases and her sentences to the large philosophical and historical questions she poses and to which she responds, Kefala has generated in her writing new ways of living in time, place and language. Across six collections of poetry and five prose works, themselves comprising fiction, non-fiction, essays and diaries, she has mapped the experience of exile and alienation alongside the creativity of a relentless reconstitution of self. Kefala is also a cultural visionary. From her rapturous account of Sydney as the place of her arrival in 1959, to her role in developing diverse writing cultures at the Australia Council, to the account of her own writing life amongst a community of friends and artists in Sydney Journals (2008), she has reimagined the ways we live and write in Australia.
Antigone's Daughters presents various readings of the classical myth of Antigone as interpreted through modern feminist and psychoanalytic literary theories. Topics such as femininity, education, and establishing selfhood amidst the restrictions of the patriarchal society presented by Sophocles provide the foundation for the modern novel. This study serves as a model for the comparative interpretation of literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including the writings of George Sand (Indiana), Karolina Pavlova (A Double Life), Nikolai Chernyshevsky (What Is to Be Done?), Emile Zola (L'Assommoir and Nana), María Luisa Bombal (La amortajada) and Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits). Each chapter isolates an aspect of Antigone's struggle within both the public and domestic spheres as she negotiates her independence and asserts her voice. A valuable tool for the study of modern literature, the universality of Antigone presented in this study prompts the investigation of many classical motifs while providing a thorough study of various national literatures within their own contemporary contexts.
In the late nineteenth century, dreams became the subject of scientific study for the first time, after thousands of years of being considered a primarily spiritual phenomenon. Before Freud and the rise of psychoanalytic interpretation as the dominant mode of studying dreams, an international group of physicians, physiologists, and psychiatrists pioneered scientific models of dreaming. Collecting data from interviews, structured observation, surveys, and their own dream diaries, these scholars produced a large body of early research on the sleeping brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book uncovers an array of case studies from this overlooked period of dream scholarship. With contributors working across the disciplines of psychology, history, literature, and cultural studies, it highlights continuities and ruptures in the history of scientific inquiry into dreams.
This book explores the enduring myth of Antigone, constantly rediscovered and relevant across centuries. It examines how myth influences collective consciousness and is kept alive through rituals. Antigone’s marginal position, created by the exclusion of Polynices from the death ritual, is analyzed using the concept of liminality developed by Van Gennep and Turner. The process of people on the threshold, likened to being in the womb by Turner, is explained through Kristeva’s ideas of subjectivity, chora, abject, and poetic language, as well as the thoughts of Guattari and Levinas. It shows how subjectivity can be constructed as singularity in moments of crisis. The book also discusses how Antigone, a founding myth of Western thought, is reconstructed in the work of Kamila Shamsie. Her rewriting of Antigone, through the character of Aneeka, a Muslim Urdu-British woman, demonstrates Antigone’s timeless power of resistance. Both Antigone and Aneeka validate Guattari’s view that subjectivity can be individualized through social and semiological ties, positioning themselves in relation to otherness, family habits, local customs, and judicial laws.
This book explores the figure of Antigone and her many reconceptualizations from antiquity to the present. One of the most popular heroines of classical literature, Antigone defied political authority to carry out the forbidden burial of her brother. Readers will become familiar with the key themes of Antigone’s story, such as the law and politics, gender, and death, tracing their survival and transformations over time. Notably, the book explores the thorough de-politicization of the heroine in philosophy and psychoanalysis, followed by a reversal and re-politicization through feminist and socio-political theories. It provides a useful tool to approach postmodern receptions of Antigone in the arts and society in the modern era, particularly in the contexts of occupied and civil war-era Greece, in Palestine, and in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. It also addresses issues of Antigone-like struggles of individuals or collectivities to overcome obstacles of systemic and racialized violence and gender-based oppression in the 21st century, while challenging heteronormative practices and policies to allow new subjectivities to emerge. Though Antigone’s story is complex, Karakantza provides an accessible, fascinating overview of this enduring figure’s legacy and impact over the course of history. Antigone provides a comprehensive study of this classical heroine, suitable for students and scholars of classical literature, reception studies, and gender studies. It also appeals to theatre practitioners interested in adapting and staging Sophocles’ Antigone, or any Antigone of the ancient sources.