Electra After Freud
Electra After Freud

Author: Jill Scott

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780801442612

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"Electra's story is essentially a tale of murder, revenge, and violence. In the ancient myth of Atreus, Agamemnon returns home from battle and receives no hero's welcome. Instead, he is greeted with an ax, murdered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover-accomplice, Aegisthus. Electra chooses anger over sorrow and stops at nothing to ensure that her mother pays. In revenge, Electra, with the help of her brother, orchestrates a brutal and bloody matricide, and her reward is the restitution of her father's good name. Amid all this chaos, Electra, Agamemnon's princess daughter, must bear the humiliation of being treated as a slave girl and labeled a madwoman."--from the IntroductionAlmost everyone knows about Oedipus and his mother, and many readers would put the Oedipus myth at the forefront of Western collective mythology. In Electra after Freud, Jill Scott leaves that couple behind and argues convincingly for the primacy of the countermyth of Agamemnon and his daughter. Through a lens of Freudian and feminist psychoanalysis, this book views renderings of the Electra myth in twentieth-century literature and culture.Scott reads several pivotal texts featuring Electra to demonstrate what she calls "a narrative revolt" against the dominance of Oedipus as archetype. Situating the Electra myth within a framework of psychoanalysis, medicine, opera, and dance, Scott investigates the heroine's role at the intersections of history and the feminine, eros and thanatos, hysteria and melancholia. Scott analyzes Electra adaptations by H.D., Hofmannsthal and Strauss, Musil, and Plath and highlights key moments in the telling and reception of the Electra myth in the modern imagination.

Electra After Freud, Death, Hysteria and Mourning
Electra After Freud, Death, Hysteria and Mourning

Author: Jill Scott

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This study considers the importance of the Electra myth for the twentieth century, and in so doing resurrects a theme which has been curiously neglected despite the proliferation of modern adaptations. The myth and its heroine are located at the intersections of history and the feminine, eros and thanatos, hysteria and melancholia. At the point of departure is Hugo yon Hofmannsthal's influential 'Elektra' (1903), which introduces two important twentieth-century innovations to the Electra myth, the heroine's death and hysteria. Walter Benjamin's reading of allegory in 'Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels' serves as a theoretical framework for a discussion of the significance of Electra's allegorical "Dance of Death" in Eugene O'Neill's 'Mourning Becomes Electra', Sartre's ' Les Mouche's and Heiner Miller's 'Hamletmaschine'. This is followed by a consideration of the uncanny similarities between Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud's case study of the hysterical "Anna O." and Hofmannsthal's Elektra, where it is demonstrated that the mythological heroine indeed subverts her hysterical diagnosis by playing analyst to her own author. A further chapter shows the complexity of the interrelations of language, music and dance in Strauss's operatic adaptation of Hofmannsthal's ' fin de siècle' play, and demonstrates that Elektra manipulates the Viennese waltz into an ironic reminder of naive frivolity, decadent decay, and omnipresent paternity. Ezra Pound's unconventional translation of Sophocles' ' Electra' in turn transforms the heroine from a grief-stricken hysteric into an angry defender of civic responsibility, whereby the mourning daughter's predicament parallels the poet's own incarceration. Finally, the poetic enactment of Electra's story is treated as the testimony of personal trauma in H.D.'s "A Dead Priestess Speaks" and Sylvia Plath's ' Ariel Poems', in which these manifestations of melancholia arguably constitute a "poetics of survival." Overcoming hysteria and mourning in an ecstatic 'Totentanz', this century's Electra ultimately triumphs through courage, strength and her fierce determination to act.

Electra after Freud
Electra after Freud

Author: Jill Scott

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1501718320

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"Electra's story is essentially a tale of murder, revenge, and violence. In the ancient myth of Atreus, Agamemnon returns home from battle and receives no hero's welcome. Instead, he is greeted with an ax, murdered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover-accomplice, Aegisthus. Electra chooses anger over sorrow and stops at nothing to ensure that her mother pays. In revenge, Electra, with the help of her brother, orchestrates a brutal and bloody matricide, and her reward is the restitution of her father's good name. Amid all this chaos, Electra, Agamemnon's princess daughter, must bear the humiliation of being treated as a slave girl and labeled a madwoman."—from the IntroductionAlmost everyone knows about Oedipus and his mother, and many readers would put the Oedipus myth at the forefront of Western collective mythology. In Electra after Freud, Jill Scott leaves that couple behind and argues convincingly for the primacy of the countermyth of Agamemnon and his daughter. Through a lens of Freudian and feminist psychoanalysis, this book views renderings of the Electra myth in twentieth-century literature and culture.Scott reads several pivotal texts featuring Electra to demonstrate what she calls "a narrative revolt" against the dominance of Oedipus as archetype. Situating the Electra myth within a framework of psychoanalysis, medicine, opera, and dance, Scott investigates the heroine's role at the intersections of history and the feminine, eros and thanatos, hysteria and melancholia. Scott analyzes Electra adaptations by H.D., Hofmannsthal and Strauss, Musil, and Plath and highlights key moments in the telling and reception of the Electra myth in the modern imagination.

Bodily Charm
Bodily Charm

Author: Linda Hutcheon

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015-08-01

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 080329476X

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Bodily Charm is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art. Written for both the opera lover and the specialist by a physician and a literary critic, it is an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body—both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra.

Reception of Northrop Frye
Reception of Northrop Frye

Author:

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 735

ISBN-13: 1487508204

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The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.

The Oedipal triangular structure and its significance for "Mourning Becomes Electra"
The Oedipal triangular structure and its significance for

Author: Moritz Tonk

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 23

ISBN-13: 3640816366

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Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language: English, abstract: Eine Hauptseminararbeit, die unter Berücksichtigung der psychoanalytischen Lesart des Freudschen Elektra-Komplexes das Drama Mourning Becomes Elektra untersucht, wobei versucht wird, die klassische Lesart durch eine differenziertere Analyse mit Hilfe einer Dreiecksbeziehung der verschiedenen Charaktere, zu überkommen.

Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth
Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth

Author: Elizabeth Loentz

Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0878201475

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In 1953, Freud biographer Ernest Jones revealed that the famous hysteric Anna O. was really Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), the prolific author, German-Jewish feminist, pioneering social worker, and activist. Elizabeth Loentz directs attention away from the young woman who arguably invented the talking cure and back to Pappenheim and her post-Anna O. achievements. Her writings, especially, reveal her to be one of the most versatile, productive, influential, and controversial Jewish thinkers and leaders of her time. Pappenheim's oeuvre includes stories, plays, poems, prayers, travel literature, letters, essays, speeches, and aphorisms. She translated Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women as well as the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hamelnand other Old Yiddish texts into German. She was discussed as both writer and newsmaker in German-Jewish newspapers of every religious and political affiliation and in German feminist publications. As founder and leader of the League of Jewish Women in Germany and the international League of Jewish Women, she was at the forefront of the campaign to combat human trafficking and forced prostitution. A pioneer of modern Jewish social work, she founded a home for at-risk girls and unwed mothers and advocated on behalf of Jewish women, children, refugees, and immigrants. Her accomplishments are all the more remarkable because she attained them after struggling to recover from the debilitating mental illness chronicled in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria(1895). Loentz examines how Pappenheim engaged, in words and deeds, with the key political, social, and cultural issues concerning German Jewry in the early decades of the twentieth century: the status of the Yiddish language, Zionism, the conversion epidemic, responses to the plight of Eastern European Jews, and Jewish spirituality. Pappenheim's unique approach to each of these issues balanced allegiances to feminism, the Jewish religion, and German culture. Loentz also explores how biographers and artists have rediscovered Pappenheim, rewritten her life story, and renegotiated her identity.

Handbook of Psychobiography
Handbook of Psychobiography

Author: William Todd Schultz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-07-07

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0195168275

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Brings together the world's leading psychobiographers, writing on many of the major figures of our age - from Osama Bin Laden to Elvis Presley. This book addresses the subject of how to construct a psychobiography. It provides useful definitions of good and bad psychobiography, and discusses an optimal structure for psychobiographical essays.