Oedipus and the Sphinx

Oedipus and the Sphinx PDF Author: Almut-Barbara Renger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604811X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
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.

Oedipus and the Sphinx

Oedipus and the Sphinx PDF Author: Almut-Barbara Renger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604811X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Get Book

Book Description
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.

The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx

The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx PDF Author: Yuan Yuan
Publisher: UPA
ISBN: 0761866639
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King PDF Author: Sophocles
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781522715993
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
Oedipus the King is the first tragic play in Sophocles' classic Oedipus trilogy. The plays tells the story of a man who eventually becomes the King of Thebes while fulfilling an extremely tragic prophecy.

Conversation with a Sphinx

Conversation with a Sphinx PDF Author: Maurice Valency
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822202394
Category : Oedipus (Greek mythology)
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
THE STORY: The scene is a mountain pass in ancient Greece, on the road to Thebes. The pass is guarded by a priestess from the temple of Hera and by a sphinx who must ask a riddle of all who pass. If the traveler cannot solve the riddle he is hurled to his death, but if he can he is allowed to pass—and proceed to his doom. A young man approaches, and while the priestess pleads that he be allowed to turn back, or to pass unchallenged, the sphinx is adamant that the riddle must be posed. The priestess retires, and the sphinx accosts the young man, Oedipus, who has come from Delphi, where he has consulted the oracle. At first he denies this, but the sphinx knows his story without his telling it—and foretells what lies ahead for him as well. In keeping with the casual, offhand mood of the play, Oedipus attempts to treat these disclosures lightly, but inevitably he cannot. The riddle is asked, and solved, the sphinx vanishes forever, and Oedipus proceeds to the awful fate that the gods have ordained for him.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

The Riddle of the Sphinx PDF Author: Tim Dedopulos
Publisher: Carlton Books
ISBN: 9781780978741
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
60 riddles and conundrums inspired by the spirit of Ancient Egypt, illustrated beautifully with hieroglyphics and iconic images dating back to 3150 BC. Puzzles include 'The Labyrinth', 'The Temple of Anubis' and 'The Priest's Estate'. Each conundrum is full of secret treasures and traps for the unwary.

The Riddles of The Hobbit

The Riddles of The Hobbit PDF Author: Adam Roberts
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137373632
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Riddles are threaded through The Hobbit , and are key to Tolkien's creative imagination. The Riddles of The Hobbit situates this novel and the rest of Tolkien's writing in the context of Old English riddling culture, and more modern day examples; it sets out to solve the many riddles of the novel in original and often surprising ways.

The New Nineteenth-century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries

The New Nineteenth-century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries PDF Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description


Oedipus Rex Or Oedipus the King: (annotated) (Worldwide Classics)

Oedipus Rex Or Oedipus the King: (annotated) (Worldwide Classics) PDF Author: Sophocles
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781090353474
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
Oedipus, King of Thebes, sends his brother-in-law, Creon, to ask advice of the oracle at Delphi, concerning a plague ravaging Thebes. Creon returns to report that the plague is the result of religious pollution, since the murderer of their former king, Laius, has never been caught. Oedipus vows to find the murderer and curses him for causing the plague.Oedipus summons the blind prophet Tiresias for help. When Tiresias arrives he claims to know the answers to Oedipus's questions, but refuses to speak, instead telling him to abandon his search. Oedipus is enraged by Tiresias' refusal, and verbally accuses him of complicity in Laius' murder. Outraged, Tiresias tells the king that Oedipus himself is the murderer ("You yourself are the criminal you seek"). Oedipus cannot see how this could be, and concludes that the prophet must have been paid off by Creon in an attempt to undermine him. The two argue vehemently, as Oedipus mocks Tiresias' lack of sight, and Tiresias in turn tells Oedipus that he himself is blind. Eventually Tiresias leaves, muttering darkly that when the murderer is discovered he shall be a native citizen of Thebes, brother and father to his own children, and son and husband to his own mother.

Favorite Greek Myths

Favorite Greek Myths PDF Author: Bob Blaisdell
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486110303
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
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.

Oedipus; or, The Legend of a Conqueror

Oedipus; or, The Legend of a Conqueror PDF Author: Marie Delcourt
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 162895387X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Marie Delcourt’s brilliant study of the Oedipus legend, an unjustly neglected monument of twentieth-century classical scholarship published in 1944 and issued here for the first time in English translation, bridges the gap between Carl Robert’s influential Oidipus (1915) and the work of Lowell Edmunds seventy years later. Delcourt studies the legend in its various aspects, six episodes that have equal weight and that stress the same themes: greatness, conquest, domination, the right to rule—all of them bound up with the idea of kingship. Together they form the biography of a Theban hero, the fullest account that has come down to us about the prehistory of sovereign power among the ancient Greeks. Delcourt does not suppose that Oedipus, or indeed any other Greek hero, was a historical figure. The personality familiar to us from the plays of the tragedians of the fifth century—our oldest source, and a very late one—was the result of their extraordinary artistry in linking together themes rooted in very ancient social and religious rites that in the interval had come to describe the feats of Oedipus, then his life, and finally his character. It was in order to explain these rites, whose meaning had ceased to be understood, that myths and legends were invented in the first place. Oedipus, Delcourt argues, is the archetype of all heroes of essentially (if not exclusively) ritual origin, whose acts were prior to their person. This is a very different— and far more complex—Oedipus than the one rather implausibly imagined by Freud. More generally, the origin and transmission of the Oedipus legend tells us a great deal about the strength and persistence of public memories in prehistoric societies.