William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, circa 1795. © Tate, London 2010
Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious
University of Essex, 2-4 September 2010
An international conference organized by the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex, supported by the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies.
Keynote speaker: Professor Steven Walker (Rutgers University)
Distinguished Bean Trust Lecturer: Professor Jason Whittaker (University College Falmouth)
Plenary speakers: Professor Marina Warner (University of Essex), Professor Robert Segal (University of Aberdeen), Eric Rhode (Psychotherapist and Independent Scholar)
Programme
Thursday 2 September 2010
Welcome and Opening Address
Marina Warner (Essex), “The Figure of the Shaman: an Enlightenment Romance”
Parallel Panel Sessions A
Panel 1: Geographies of Myth
H. S. Shiva Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “Re-inscribing Myths in Post-colonial India: Risks and Rewards”
Silvia Annavini (University of Trento), “Restoring Myths Reshaping Nations: Mythology, Mythopoiesis and Mythogenesis in Mensagem by Fernando Pessoa”
Karen Ferreira-Meyers (University of Swaziland), “Dreams, Visions and Myths in Contemporary Southern African Crime Writing”
Panel 2: Myth and Psychoanalytic Practice
Megumi Yama (Kyoto Gakuen University), “‘Silence’ in Psychotherapy and a Beginning in Japanese Creative Myth”
Elizabeth Brodersen (analytical psychologist), “In the Nature of Twins: A Study of the Archetypal Realm of Universal Duality, Opposition and Imitation”
Tuly Amit Flint (psychotherapist),“‘Thank God This Is Someone Else’s Story’: The Impact of Listening to Myth and Folktales on PTSD Sufferers”
Panel 3: Myths, Symbols, Rituals
Penny Hallas and Lyndon Davies (writer and art psychotherapist), “The Orpheus Project”
Janet Bubar Rich (writer), “The Significance and Meaning of the Horse Archetype in Mythology”
Suzanne Nolan (University of Essex), “The Ritual Re-Enactment of the Ball Game – Impersonating the Gods”
Panel 4: William Blake
Mark Ryan (University of Nottingham), “‘Striving with Systems to Deliver Individuals’: William Blake’s Re-animation of Dead Myth”
Dhananjay Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “William Blake: An Indian Perspective”
Salvo Pitruzzella (The Arts Therapies Training Centre, Lecco, Italy), “Creativity in Blake’s Myth”
Welcome Reception
Hosted by the Vice-Chancellor of Essex, Professor Colin Riordan
Plenary Lecture on William Blake
Sponsored by the Bean Trust: Jason Whittaker (University College Falmouth), “The Divine Image: Remaking Blake’s Myths”
Friday 3 September 2010
Parallel Panel Sessions B
Panel 1: Classical Greek Myth
Seemee Ali (Carthage College), “The Death and Birth of Myth in the Iliad”
Ben Pestell (University of Essex), “Either Oar: Transformation and Concealment in the Homecomings of Odysseus and Agamemnon”
Ann Shearer (analytical psychologist), “Humour and Healing: Iambe’s gift”
Panel 2: Romanticist Cycles
Alan Cardew (University of Essex), “Cancelled Cycles: Before the Origin”
Paul Bishop (University of Glasgow), “From the Archaic into the Aesthetic: Myth and Literature in Goethe”
Anita Klujber (University of Essex), “Arpeggios of Eternity”
Panel 3: Oedipal Themes
Saugata Bhaduri (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “The Yayāti Complex: A Comparatist Take on Myth and the Unconscious”
Paul Cantz (Seguin Services, US), “The Slaughter of Isaac: Oedipal Themes in the Biblical Akedah Revisited”
Alison Ryan (University of Manchester), “Oedipus at the Opera – a Psychoanalytic Case-study of Enescu’s Oedipe”
Panel 4: Postmodern Reassessments
Michael Whan (analytical psychologist), “Re-enchantment as Nihilism”
Oliver Harris (Birkbeck), “Myth without an Unconscious: Eros in the Work of Freud and Lacan”
James Corby (University of Malta), “The Mythical Countertextual from Derrida to Badiou”
Plenary Panel
Eric Rhode (independent scholar and psychotherapist), “The Boy Who Had Dreams in His Mouth”
Robert Segal (University of Aberdeen), “The Myth of the Hero: Freudian and Jungian approaches”
Parallel Panel Sessions C
Panel 1: Contemporary Lore
Angie Voela (University of East London), “From Oedipus to Ahab (and back)”
Simi Malhotra (Jamia Millia Islamia), “Myth and the Unconscious in Today’s World: Of Faxlore and Urban Legends”
Paul Attinello (Newcastle University), “Death’s Wardens: Archetypal Figures and AIDS in Stage & Film”
Panel 2: Myth, Therapy, Society
Matthew Boyle (University of Essex), “Faust and Modernity: Allegories of Inflation and Transgression in Marlowe, Goethe and Mann”
Christopher Scanlon (psychotherapist), “Diogenes-the-Cynic meets Alexander-the-Great: a Psycho-social Paradigm for Modern Encounters with ‘Unhoused Minds’?”
Joseph Sobol (East Tennessee State University), “The Cancer Journey as Rite of Passage: A Narrative Approach to Cancer Diagnosis, Treatment, and Outcomes”
Panel 3: Songs and Stories
Adrian May (University of Essex), “Caedmon’s Own Song”
Clive Mariner (psychotherapist), “Folksongs: Literature of the Illiterate and Repository of Myths and Archetypes”
Martin Shaw (University of Plymouth), “The Pastoral and Prophetic: Storytellers and the Ecstatic Image”
Panel 4: Jungian Readings
Janet Walker (Rutgers University), “Anima and Individuation in Akinari Ueda’s Story ‘Jasei no in’ (‘The Lust of the Serpent’, 1776)”
Rowena Clarke (University of Essex), “Myths of the Near Future: Jungian Psychology and J. G. Ballard’s Fictional Worlds”
Mathew Mather (University of Essex), “Jung and Merlin”
Parallel Panel Sessions D
Panel 1: Drama and Myth
Michael McShane (Carthage College), “Christianity as Myth in Shakespeare’s King Lear”
GJV Prasad (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “The Necessity of Myth: Karnad and Indian English Drama”
Kyounghye Kwon (The Ohio State University), “Marina Carr and Myth: The Creolized Archetype and the Cross-Cultural Networks of the Unconscious”
Panel 2: Myth and Modernism
Martin Simonson (The University of the Basque Country), “Revisiting the ‘Mythical Method’: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”
John Marland (York St John University), “Lawrence and Joyce: The Dialogue between Myth and Fiction”
Cumhur Yilmaz Madran (Pamukkale University), “The Archetypes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
Panel 3: Myth, Film, Geography
Sobia Quazi (University of Essex), “Playing in the Transitional Space: Myth, Psychoanalysis and Spectral Women in the Modern Japanese horror film”
Tracy Rovier Dunlop (University of Derby), “Imagining a Bright Star among the Living: The Seamstress of the Soul”
Chiara Reghellin (University of Essex), “Venice: Where Visible and Invisible Merge”
Panel 4: Seasons and Visions
Sarah Halford (analytical psychologist), “Psyche’s Seasons”
Roderick Main (University of Essex), “Myth, Synchronicity, and Re-enchantment”
Liz Greene (University of Wales), “The Myth of the Soul’s Ascent: Astral Bodies, Planetary Sins, and Jung’s concept of ‘individuation’”
Key Note Lecture
Steven F. Walker (Rutgers University): “Apocalypse and Scapegoats: Moving Myth into the 21st Century”
Saturday 4 September 2010
Parallel Panel Sessions E
Panel 1: Myth, History, Psychoanalysis
Matt ffytche (University of Essex), “Hoffmann’s ‘Mines of Falun’: Myth, History and Indeterminacy in the Depths of the Soul”
Georg Nicolaus (psychotherapist), “Mythopoeic Creativity in Schelling, N. Berdyaev and C. G. Jung”
Will Buckingham (De Montfort University), “The Yijing, Storytelling and the Cognitive Unconscious”
Panel 2: Women and Myth
Helen Luu (Royal Military College of Canada), “Rewriting Feminist Desire: Augusta Webster’s ‘Circe’ and ‘Medea in Athens’”
Bethan Coombs (University of Glamorgan), “‘Mine! At last! I have made you!’: An Exploration of Patriarchal Mythmaking in the Work of Hilda Vaughan”
Ayako Mizuo (Prefectural University of Kumamoto), “Challenging the Myth of Childhood Innocence: Fairy Tales and Socialism in A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book”
Panel 3: Images, Dreams, Stories
Carol Leader (psychoanalytic psychotherapist), “Evil and Imagination in the Unconscious: Blake’s Satan, Jung’s Shadow and Faulk’s Engleby”
Stephen Friedrich (psychotherapist), “Fainting: Peter, Freud and Heinrich von Kleist”
Leon Burnett (University of Essex), “Sorrow and Surprise: A Reading of Gautier’s Sphinx-complex”
Parallel Panel Sessions F
Panel 1: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and Femininity
Elisa Segnini (University of Toronto), “Mythmaking and Tropes of Uncanniness in Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas”
Carolyn Harford (University of Swaziland), “Violation and the Inscription of Opposites in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
Laura Green (University of Liverpool), “Myths, Matricide and the Imaginary in Irigaray”
Panel 2: Images and Responses
Tony W. Garland (University of Northampton), “Degeneration and Obsession: The Mythical Figure of the Nineteenth-century Femme Fatale”
Saul Andreetti (University of Essex), “The Power of Myth in the Works of Jacques Attali and Michael Ende”
Francesca Aniballi (University of Glasgow), “The Re-inscription of the Myth of the Hunter Turned into a Coyote by the Trickster in L. M. Silko’s Ceremony (1977)”
Panel 3: New Landscapes of Drama
Namrata Jain, “Folk–Urban, Mythic–Contemporary Continuum on the Indian Proscenium: A Study of Girish Karnad’s Naga Mandala”
Sonja Novak (University of J. J. Strossmayer, Osijek), “New Perspectives on Old Ideas: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Use of Ancient Myths in Works of Art and Literature”
Steve Myers (University of Essex), “Star Wars IV vs. Star Trek V: Psychological vs. Visionary”
Panel 4: Myth and Lyric
Nathalie Pilard (University of Aberdeen), “A Myth of the Origin: the Hermesian Birth of the Poet. A Jungian Reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Demon of Analogy’”
Josephine von Zitzewitz (University of Oxford), “Myth and Modernism in 1970s Soviet Poetry: Krivulin and Mironov”
Iain Twiddy (Hokkaido University), “Classical Myth in Contemporary Elegy”
Plenary Roundtable
Plenary Speakers and General Meeting
Essex Myth 