By Almut-Barbara Renger
ISBN-10: 022604811X
ISBN-13: 9780226048116
While Oedipus met the Sphinx at the highway to Thebes, he did greater than solution a riddle—he spawned a fantasy that, instructed and retold, may turn into one in every of Western culture’s primary narratives approximately self-understanding. selecting the tale as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and unsafe realm the place ideas and bounds are usually not known—Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a clean account of this mythic stumble upon and the way it offers with the techniques of liminality and otherness.
Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story’s meanings and services in classical antiquity—from its presence in historic vase portray to its absence in Sophocles’s tragedy—before arriving at of its significant reworkings in eu modernity: the psychoanalytic idea of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. via her readings, she highlights the ambiguous prestige of the Sphinx and divulges Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, supplying key insights into Sophocles’s portrayal and developing a theoretical framework that organizes reviews of the myth’s reception within the 20th century.
Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition skilled through all of humankind, Renger situates delusion among the competing claims of technology and paintings in an engagement that has very important implications for present debates in literary reports, psychoanalytic thought, cultural heritage, and aesthetics.
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Additional resources for Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau
Sample text
She is, so to speak, a child of the threshold; this much, and no more, is clear. All of her possible family members threaten the normal form and proportions of the human body and the larger sphere of normally defined society. Every purported progenitor has a gross surplus of limbs, heads, and voices, to the point of redundancy. Representing the earth’s primal violence, they are beings at once fearsomely destructive and fearsomely fertile. To be a member of the Echidna line is to be χθόνιος (“of the soil, associated with the underworld”), to possess earthy powers, which, in their chaotic nature, pose a threat to human existence.
But, more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, at least insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers, and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. 12 Freud’s abundant use of the first person plural forms of the personal and possessive pronouns (“we [. ] all,” “we,” “our”) shows that he saw the infantile Oedipal conflict (and the trouble that arises when the adult remains trapped in the nexus of that conflict) as an anthropological constant.
Classifying con30 c ha pter two clusions on the position of the person or the group, either in the prior social structure or in the one that will subsequently predominate, is impossible. Van Gennep sees the threshold of the entryway into a house or into a temple as exemplary of this state, marking and symbolizing the transition between public and private, or between profane and sacred, spaces. ”20 He understands these guardians to be earthly incarnations of the threshold’s supernatural qualities.
Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau by Almut-Barbara Renger
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