Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf expands this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle. Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider—and then she discovers the appalling secret behind the king's claim to power. Unwilling to ignore the horrifying truth about the state, she becomes a threat to the king and his ruthless advisors. Then abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and a murderess. Long a sharp-eyed political observer, Christa Wolf transforms this ancient tale into a startlingly relevant commentary on our times. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, and yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, her Medea is a stunningly perceptive and probingly honest work of fiction.
The figure of Medea has inspired artists in all fields throughout the centuries. This work examines the major representations of Medea in myth, art, and ancient and contemporary literature, as well as the philosophical, psychological and cultural questions these portrayals raise.
Giving access to the latest critical thinking on the subject, Medea is a comprehensive guide to sources that paints a vivid portrait of the Greek sorceress Medea, famed in myth for the murder of her children after she is banished from her own home and replaced by a new wife. Emma Griffiths brings into focus previously unexplored themes of the Medea myth, and provides an incisive introduction to the story and its history. Studying Medea’s ‘everywoman’ status – one that has caused many intricacies of her tale to be overlooked – Griffiths places the story in ancient and modern context and reveals fascinating insights into ancient Greece and its ideology, the importance of life, the role of women and the position of the outsider. In clear, user-friendly terms, the book situates the myth within analytical frameworks such as psychoanalysis, and Griffiths highlights Medea’s position in current classical study as well as her lasting appeal.
Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez is an iconic figure in her Crimean village, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek in a family that has lived on that coast for centuries. Childless Medea is the touchstone of a large family, which gathers each spring and summer at her home. There are her nieces (sexy Nike and shy Masha), her nephew Georgii (who shares Medea’s devotion to the Crimea), and their friends. In this single summer, the languor of love will permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories will float to consciousness, allowing us to experience not only the shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition, but also the dramatic saga of this family amid the forces of dislocation, war, and upheaval of twentieth-century Russian life.
This ain't no Dreamgirls," Rhodessa Jones warns participants in the Medea Project, the theater program for incarcerated women that she founded and directs. Her expectations are grounded in reality, tempered, for example, by the fact that women are the fastest growing population in U.S. prisons. Still, Jones believes that by engaging incarcerated women in the process of developing and staging dramatic works based on their own stories, she can push them toward tapping into their own creativity, confronting the problems that landed them in prison, and taking control of their lives. Rena Fraden chronicles the collaborative process of transforming incarcerated women's stories into productions that incorporate Greek mythology, hip-hop music, dance, and autobiography. She captures a diverse array of voices, including those of Jones and other artists, the sheriff and prison guards, and, most vividly, the women themselves. Through compelling narrative and thoughtful commentary, Fraden investigates the Medea Project's blend of art and activism and considers its limits and possibilities for enacting social change. Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the San Francisco-based performance company Cultural Odyssey and founder of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. An award-winning performer, she has taught at the Yale School of Drama and the New College of California.
This volume offers a critical yet empathic exploration of the ancient myth of Medea as immortalized by early Greek and Roman dramatists to showcase the tragic forces afoot when relational suffering remains unresolved in the lives of individuals, families and communities. Medea as a tragic figure, whose sense of isolation and betrayal interferes with her ability to form healthy attachments, reveals the human propensity for violence when the agony of unresolved grief turns to vengeance against those we hold most dear. However, metaphorically, her life story as an emblem for existential crisis serves as a psychological touchstone in the lives of early twentieth-century female authors, who struggled to find their rightful place in the world, to resolve the sorrow of unrequited love and devotion, and to reconcile experiences of societal abandonment and neglect as self-discovery.
Euripides' Medea, produced in the year that the Peloponnesian War began, presents the first in a parade of vivid female tragic protagonists across the Euripidean stage. Throughout the centuries it has been regarded as one of the most powerful of the Greek tragedies. McDermott's starting point is an assessment of the character of Medea herself. She confronts the question: What does an audience do with a tragic protagonist who is at once heroic, sympathetic, and morally repugnant? We see that the play portrays a world from which all order has been deliberately and pointedly removed and in which the very reality or even potentiality of order is implicitly denied. Euripides' plays invert, subvert, and pervert traditional assertions of order; they challenge their audience's most basic tenets and assumptions about the moral, social, and civic fabric of mankind and replace them with a new vision based on clearly articulated values of his own. One who seeks for &"meaning&" in this tragedy will come closest to finding it by examining everything in the play (characters, their actions, choruses, mythic plots and allusions to myth, place within literary traditions and use of conventions) in close conjunction with a feasible reconstruction of the audience's expectations in each regard, for we see that it is a keynote of Euripides' dramaturgy to fail to fulfill these expectations. This study proceeds from the premise that Medea's murder of her children is the key to the play. We see that the introduction of this murder into the Medea-saga was Euripides' own innovation. We see that the play's themes include the classic opposition of Man and Woman. Finally, we see that in Greek culture the social order is maintained by strict adherence within the family to the rule that parents and children reciprocally nurture one another in their respective ages of helplessness. Through the heroine's repeated assaults on this fundamental and sacred value, the playwright most persuasively portrays her as an incarnation of disorder. This book is for all students and scholars of Greek literature, whether in departments of Classics or English or Comparative Literature, as well as those concerned with the role of women in literature.
