- Return to Oedipus (2018)
- Journeys to Mictlan and Xibalba (2016)
- Reading the Strands of Ariadne’s Story (2016)
- Junot Díaz and a Graeco-Caribbean Mythology (2015)
- Shakespeare and Myth-Making (2015)
- The Orpheus Project (2012)
- Sukunahikona (2011)
Open Seminar
Centre for Myth Studies
University of Essex
Thursday 19 July 2018, at 12.00pm in Room EBS.1.1
Return to Oedipus
Professor Marinos Pourgouris
(University of Cyprus)
Jean-Antoine Theodore Giroust (1753-1817), Oedipus at Colonus (1788), Dallas Museum of Art, available on Wikimedia Commons
If there is one story, one narrative, at the very center of Freudian theory it is undoubtedly structured around the myth of Oedipus. The story of Oedipus has become, as Shoshana Felman writes, the “reference narrative” and the “specimen story of psychoanalysis.” Indeed, one could even go as far as asserting that the entire corpus of Freud’s work is built around the story of Oedipus and it is firmly rooted in the theory of the Oedipus complex. The prominence of the Oedipus story is not surprising to Freud’s readers since, as he writes in Totem and Taboo, the primordial story of the murder of the father and the erotic attraction to the mother “was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.” What is astounding, however, considering the prominence of the Oedipus myth in Freud’s work, is the complete omission of any reference to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. One would assume that what happens to the unfortunate King Oedipus after his fall, after the revelation of his monstrous deeds—that is, after he gains the hitherto foreclosed knowledge of his true identity—would be of interest to Freud and his circle. In fact, Oedipus at Colonus raises a number of important issues that could have been—and later came to be—at the very center of psychoanalytic discourse: his own position and behavior as father, his self-image following the après-coup revelation of trauma, society’s view of him as a miasma, the possible compulsion to repeat the traumatic past, or the ways in which the play opens up the possibility for atonement.
This paper will venture to examine the absence of any references to the play in Freud’s work and will refer to some of the most important early psychoanalytic attempts to interpret it. What might be the reasons for such a peculiar omission? Did the play—which is indeed a strange kind of tragedy—pose a challenge to the standard Freudian “reference narrative”? What possibilities are there for alternative psychoanalytic interpretations of Oedipus at Colonus? Though I will make reference to several complementary narratives in discussing the play, participants are advised to read (or re-read) Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.
Marinos Pourgouris is Assistant Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Cyprus. He is the author of two monographs, Mediterranean Modernisms: The Poetic Metaphysics of Odysseus Elytis (Ashgate, 2011/ Routledge, 2016) and Empire of Intimacy: The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2018), and the editor of The Avant-Garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006) and Οδυσσέας Ελύτης: Πρόσληψη, θεωρία, ποίηση. Πρακτικά Συνεδρίου [Odysseus Elytis: Reception, Theory, Poetry. Conference Proceedings] (Ypsilon, 2014). He has authored numerous articles and essays on topics ranging from Nietzsche’s conception of history, through modern Greek writing, postcolonialism, public performance of dissent, to contemporary cinema.
ALL WELCOME
Centre for Myth Studies & ESCALA
Special Event
University of Essex
Thursday 23 June 2016, at 12:00 in Room CB.21
Journeys to Mictlan and Xibalba: an introduction to the Aztec and Maya afterlife through art
Dr. Joanne Harwood (University of Essex)
Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Figura Prehispánica VIII. Vaso zoomorfo, Colima (Prehispanic Figure VIII. Zoomorphic vase, Colima), 1976 © the artist, image © ESCALA
In this object-based session we will introduce Aztec and Maya beliefs about the afterlife through artworks in the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA). ESCALA is a unique research and teaching collection at the University of Essex housed in a purpose-designed space in the Constable Buildings. The Collection includes a number of artworks that relate to pre-Columbian and indigenous beliefs and myths; a legacy of Professor Emeritus Gordon Brotherston’s world-renowned expertise in pictorial indigenous American literatures. Some of them, including those listed below, are inspired by Aztec and Maya traditions and art, and specifically the role of the underworld (Mictlan for the Aztecs and Xibalba for the Maya) in cosmogony and the birth of humans. As Mary Miller and Karl Taube have noted, ‘In Mesoamerican thought death was closely integrated into the world of the living’ and life and death were believed ‘to exist in dynamic and complementary opposition’ (1997: 74). This is evident in almost every aspect of Aztec and Maya thought and culture, and the legacies of the integration of death into the world of the living apparent in Mexico’s contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations.
See the list of recommended and additional readings
Dr Joanne Harwood is Director of ESCALA (Essex Collection of Art from Latin America)
The event will be followed by drinks
ALL WELCOME
Open Seminar
Centre for Myth Studies
University of Essex
Thursday 17 March 2016, at 5:00pm in Room 5N.3.9
Reading the Strands of Ariadne’s Story
Dr. Leon Burnett (University of Essex)
Mikhail Ivanovich Kozlovsky, “Bacchus sees Ariadne sleeping on the island of Naxos” (1780), The State Tretyakov Gallery, Russia http://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/en/collection/_show/image/_id/2241
The story of Ariadne, shaped by her encounters with Theseus and Dionysus, is one of union and separation, of joy and despair, of displacement in life and transfiguration in death. It is filled with an ambivalence characteristic of myth in general and of Greek mythology in particular. In her life, two locations stand out as pre-eminent: the intricate labyrinth in the Cretan palace at Knossos and the deserted beach on the island of Naxos (or, as it is called in antiquity, Dia). Each of these locations provides a striking backdrop for the enfolding and unfolding of the emotional turmoil that may be read in the tale of Ariadne. The seminar paper explores the ‘emotional logic’ of Ariadne’s story, contrasting the treatment of the myth in the ancient world with its manifestation in the literature and art of the twentieth century.
Pre-seminar reading: Catullus’ Poem 64 (The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis)
Dr. Leon Burnett is former Director of the Centre for Myth Studies (2008-2014). His research and publications are mainly in Comparative Literature and Mythology. He was the main editor of the British Comparative Literature Association’s house journal, New Comparison, for eight years (1992-2000) and, more recently, he has co-edited three books: The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia (2013), Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013), and Translating Myth (2016).
Followed by drinks
ALL WELCOME
A report on this seminar can be read here.
Open Seminar
Centre for Myth Studies
University of Essex
Thursday 26 November 2015, at 5:00pm in Room 5S.4.4
Junot Díaz and a Graeco-Caribbean Mythology
Dr. Justine McConnell (Oxford University)
Pinturicchio, The Return of Odysseus (1509), National Gallery, London [image on the public domain]
Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) pivots around the fukú americanus, ‘the local version of House Atreus’, while his earlier collection of short stories, Drown (1996), is – in his own words – ‘a reverse Odyssey… told from Telemakos’ point of view’. This paper will explore Díaz’s fiction, focusing on the ways in which he interweaves Greek myth with twentieth-century Dominican political history to create a new, national myth for the Dominican Republic.
Pre-seminar reading: Junot Díaz’s ‘Aguantando’
Dr. Justine McConnell is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she is working on contemporary African, Caribbean, and ancient Greek poetics. She is author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora (2013), and co-editor of Ancient Slavery and Abolition: from Hobbes to Hollywood (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015).
Followed by drinks
ALL WELCOME
Joint Open Seminar
Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre
Studies & Centre for Myth Studies
Tuesday 23 June 2015, at 5:00pm, in 5A.118
Shakespeare and myth-making
Professor Sarah Annes Brown
(Anglia Ruskin University)
Figure 12. Antonio Tempesta, Diana and Actaeon, etching, 9.7 x 11.5 cm (From: Metamorphoseon sive transformationum Ovidii libri XV [Antwerp: P. de Jode, 1606], no. 25) (artwork in the public domain)
Sarah Annes Brown will introduce a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of mythical allusions in his works, focusing particularly on the way in which he seems to exploit the ambiguity and reversibility of so many mythic narratives – for example the story of Actaeon, alluded to in Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus. She will also explore how Shakespeare himself became mythologised by later writers, and will conclude with a discussion of Shakespeare as a mythical presence in post-apocalyptic science fiction such as Alex Irvine’s 2009 short story Seventh Fall.
Pre-seminar reading: Alex Irvine, ‘Seventh Fall’: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2009/seventh_fall_by_alex_irvine
Sarah Annes Brown is Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University. Her publications include The Metamorphosis of Ovid: Chaucer to Ted Hughes (1999) and A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (2012). She is currently researching a monograph on Shakespeare and Science Fiction.
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Followed by drinks in 5A.202
ALL WELCOME
The Centre for Myth Studies presents
The Orpheus Project
Tuesday 8 May 2012
6.00 p.m.
Room 5A.330
ALL WELCOME
Wine, juice and nibbles provided
Image from Penny Hallas’s series of Orpheus Drawings. Used with permission.
The myth of Orpheus still resonates powerfully in Western Culture. Intrigued by its continuing relevance for artistic practitioners, three poets, a musician and a painter came together to explore the creative possibilities of the myth through varying patterns of interdisciplinary engagement. For the landscapes of Thrace and Avernus the Orpheus Project substituted the hills around Llangattock in Powys, focussing especially on the quarries and caves of the local nature reserve.
Using words, images, film, photographs and music, Lyndon Davies and Penny Hallas give an account of the development of the project so far.
For more information, see the personal websites of Lyndon Davies and Penny Hallas:
- Lyndon Davies
- Penny Hallas (including Penny’s Orpheus Drawings)
Text: Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest of Times to A.D. 697, ed and trans. W. G. Aston, pp. 58-63.
Essex Myth 
