Antigone S Wake

Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Kluger, emerge as exemplary in their contributions to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. While acknowledging that the German audience for the works of Holocaust survivors began to change in the 1980s, this study disputes the common tendency to interpret this as a sign of greater willingness to confront the Holocaust, arguing instead that it resulted from a continued German misreading of Jews' criticisms. By tracing the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Kluger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confronting the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans. Furthermore, for the authors this literature also had a psychological impact: their 'return' to the German language and to Germany is read not as an act of mourning or nostalgia, but rather as a public call to Germans for a dialogue about the Nazi past, as a way to move into the public realm the private emotional and psychological battles resulting from German Jews' exclusion from and persecution by their own national community.

In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy has traditionally been taken to be a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persists, contextualizing it in a longer literary and philosophical history from Ovid to Pasolini. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, exemplifies the persistence of violence in literature and art. A refugee who is welcomed yet feared, who confirms the social while threatening its integrity, Medea offers an alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone. The Medean presence, Cherbuliez shows, offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness, both for classical theater and for its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama, from rhetorical devices like ekphrasis to dramaturgical mechanisms like machinery, all of which involve temporal disruption. The full range of this Medean presence is explored in treatments of the character Medea and in works figuratively invoking a Medean presence, from the well-known tragedies of Racine and Corneille through a range of other neoclassical political theater, including spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater. In the Wake of Medea recognizes the violence within these tragedies to explain why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.

According to Greek legend, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the order of Creon, king of Thebes. Sentenced to death by Creon, she forestalled him by committing suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon--between the state and the individual, between man and woman, between young and old--has captured the Western imagination for more than 2000 years. George Steiner here examines the far-reaching legacy of this great classical myth. He considers its treatment in Western art, literature, and thought--in drama, poetry, prose, philosophic discourse, political tracts, opera, ballet, film, and even the plastic arts. A study in poetics and in the philosophy of reading, Antigones leads us to look again at the influence the Greek myths exercise on twentieth-century culture. "A remarkable feat of intellectual agility."--Washington Post Book World "[An] intellectually demanding but rewarding book. . . consistently stimulating and sometimes disturbing."--The New Republic "An. . . account of the various treatments of the Antigone theme in European languages. . . Penetrating and novel."--The New York Times Book Review "A tradition of intelligence and style lives in this prolific man."--Los Angeles Times "Antigones triumphantly demonstrates that Antigone could fill several volumes of study without becoming tedious or exhausted."--The New York Review of Books

The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.

Book Description Athens, 440 BC. Under Pericles, the democracy is building its imperial legacy in blood, stone, and ballots. Ruling the stage, Sophocles premieres the tragedy of Antigone, earning renown that propels him to an honorary generalship. But the honor turns serious when war breaks out with the powerful island of Samos. Can Sophocles the playwright now direct real soldiers in a war that will decide the fate of Athens¿ sea empire? ............................. Author Bio: Nicholas Nicastro was born in Astoria, New York in 1963. He has also worked as a film critic, a hospital orderly, a newspaper reporter, a library archivist, a college lecturer in anthropology and psychology, an animal behaviorist, and an advertising salesman. In addition to Antigone¿s Wake, his published novels include The Eighteenth Captain (1999), Between Two Fires (2002), Empire of Ashes (2004), and The Isle of Stone (2005). His writings also include short fiction, travel and science articles in such publications as The New York Times, The New York Observer, Film Comment, and The International Herald Tribune. ........................... Reviews: ¿Nicastro is an author who clearly relishes his subject. Each sentence bursts with juicy, nurturing historical detail and considered thought about the hopes, aspirations, ideals and troubles of those who lived in the distant past. We follow the triumphs and travails of Sophocles as he struggles to create his art and also be what Athens wants him to be¿a brilliant general. Athens as a great civilization is constructed in front of our eyes. Nicastro brings to life both the back-streets of the city and the sea-battle-lanes of its Empire. The towering giants of Western history; Sophocles, Euripides, Pericles¿and his consort Aspasia¿are, through his vivid imagination, given a voice. This book allows the reader to inhabit the Golden Age of Athens, and to taste its grit as well as its glory.¿ ¿Bettany Hughes, PBS and BBC, author of Helen of Troy: The Story Behind the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Inspired by the work of such French theorists as Luce Irigaray and Jacques Lacan, Joyce's Waking Women is the first book-length feminist study of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Sheldon Brivic's engaging style makes his guide an ideal introduction for students and others just getting their feet wet in the riverrun of Joyce's language. Helping newcomers gain the sensibility and skills essential to reading any part of the book, Brivic focuses on its many strands of feminine narrative, especially the two remarkably beautiful sections that highlight Anna Livia Plurabelle. Anna Livia, Brivic argues, embodies a radical vision of how women are entrapped and how they will free themselves. He sees her speech as the first--and last--testament of a multiracial, international heroine whose dreams for the future merge with a determination to reject male authority.

The central claim of this book is that, early and late, Wittgenstein modelled his approach to existential meaning on his account of linguistic meaning. A reading of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy sets up Bearn's reading of the existential point of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Bearn argues that both books try to resolve our anxiety about the meaning of life by appeal to the deep, unutterable essence of the world. Bearn argues that as Wittgenstein's and Nietzsche's thought matured, they both separately came to believe that the answer to our existential anxiety does not lie beneath the surfaces of our lives, but in our acceptance--Nietzsche's "Yes"--of the groundless details of those surfaces themselves: the wonder of the ordinary