Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gourd
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Commit Suicide

As Septimus Smith prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window and ‘vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings,’ he comments on the narrative tradition of his own tragic demise. ‘It was their idea of tragedy,’ he reflects with bitter irony – ‘Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing.’ This paper addresses the wider implications of this sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by positioning Septimus’ death as the tragic climax and dramatic focus of the novel. Previous scholarship has failed to recognise the significance of this allusion to Greek tragedy, though Woolf was an accomplished classical scholar and a voracious reader of ancient literature. This detail would repay attention, as the author’s self-conscious engagement with the literary and intellectual tradition of tragedy, demonstrated through the narrative and suicide of Septimus Smith, impacts upon our understanding of the novel as a whole. It raises several important questions which this paper seeks to address: to what extent does Woolf intend for us to sympathise with Septimus as the tragic protagonist? How does Woolf’s appropriation and manipulation of the tragic genre reflect her views on war, mental illness, and her relationship with her doctors? And finally, what does it tell us about Woolf’s idea of tragedy, and what she considers to be tragic?

scholarly journals Management challenges in patients with comorbid COVID-19 associated delirium and serious mental illness – A case series

2021 ◽  
pp. 009121742098597
Author(s):  
Saba Syed ◽  
Michael Couse ◽  
Rashi Ojha
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Serious Mental Illness ◽  
Healthcare Providers ◽  
Case Series ◽  
Retrospective Chart Review ◽  
Active Management ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Psychiatric Facility ◽  
Medical Teams ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Background There is still a lot unknown about the novel Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) and its effects in humans. This pandemic has posed several challenging clinical situations to healthcare providers. Objective We hope to highlight the distinctive challenges that COVID-19 presents in patients with serious mental illness and what steps primary medical teams can take to co-manage these patients with the psychiatry consultants. Methods We present a retrospective chart review of four patients who were on psychotropic polypharmacy and admitted to our hospital from the same long-term psychiatric facility with COVID-19 delirium and other associated medical complications. Results We illustrate how the primary medical teams and psychiatrists collaborated in clinical diagnosis, treatment, and management. Conclusions Patients with serious mental illness and COVID-19 infection require active collaboration between primary medical teams and psychiatrists for diagnostic clarification, reduction of psychotropic polypharmacy to avoid adverse effects and drug-drug interactions, prevention of psychiatric decompensation, and active management of agitation while balancing staff and patient safety concerns.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

Making the Invisible Visible: Black Lesbianism in The Color Purple

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 58-63
Author(s):  
Ana Maria Basarabă
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Black Men ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Factors ◽  
Heterosexual Relationship ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Black Lesbians ◽  
Color Purple ◽  
The Invisible

The paper aims to disclose the factors behind Celie’s preference of transition from an involuntary heterosexual relationship to a homosexual one. I pursue this path due to multiple factors that occur in the novel and which nevertheless lead to Celie’s final homosexual identity. Homosexuality is far too often regarded as a mental illness and people have far too many times misjudged people with other sexual orientation than what the society perceives as “normal”. The findings of my research intend to show that homosexuality implies a variety of psychological, emotional and physical issues and that it is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. Since racism has always been associated with Black men and sexism with White females, the paper brings the invisible Black lesbians to light.

Johannine Commentaries in the Early Church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Early Church ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Face ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
John's Gospel ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

This chapter sets the making of commentaries on John’s Gospel, particularly within the Greek tradition, in the context of ancient Greek scholarship and the emergence of a scholastic tradition within the early Church. These commentaries drew on established philological conventions in order to clarify ambiguities and complexities within the text. At the same time, they served to amplify the meaning of the text in the face of new questions, controversies and preoccupations. Commentators used John’s Gospel ‘to think with’. With its allusive prose and symbolic discourse, the Fourth Gospel provoked commentators to respond to on-going doctrinal debate and to work out wider questions about Christian doctrine and identity.

scholarly journals Allusion As The Way Of Rendering Elements Of Ancient Greek Mythology In The Tissue Of Modern Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (01) ◽  
pp. 505-514
Author(s):  
Mirzaeva Aziza Shavkatovna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Way

World literature of XX century has experienced the great influence of postmodermism, which resulted in diversity of styles and refusal of well-known structures and forms. One of the most widely used stylistic devices, characterizing the features of postmodernism, is intertextuality. Appearing only in recent years, intertext become widespread with its own forms, such as allusion, quote and reminiscence. And the novel “Percy Jackson” b y American writer Rick Riordan seems to be an example of the use of intertext-allusion within the work. 12-year-old boy, Percy Jackson, becomes the part of adventeruos, danderous and exciting world of Ancient Greek Gods, legends, myths and heroes. This work tries to study and analyse the importance of allusion to understand the idea of the writer and interpret the used allusions in the first book of Riordan “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief”.

scholarly journals Aleksandr Karepin, the nephew of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the hero of his novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Maria A. Myakinchenko
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Healthy Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

The article discusses aspects of the relationship between Fyodor Dostoevsky and his nephew Aleksandr Karepin as well as their reflection in the writer's work. The peculiarities of the nature and character of Aleksandr Karepin are briefly described; he was a very peculiar and not completely mentally healthy person, who served as the prototype for various, in fact, diametrically opposed in spiritual terms heroes – Pavel Trusotsky from “The Eternal Husband” and Prince Myshkin from the novel “The Idiot”. The article concludes that the use of different, sometimes opposite personality traits of the prototype when creating images of the heroes of the works was a feature of the creative method of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In addition, Aleksandr Karepin's mental illness and the oddities in his behaviour allowed the writer to think out in different ways and build not only the image of a hero with certain features of the prototype, but also the attitude of the world around him to this character, which in turn illustrates the diseases of society.

scholarly journals Kant’s Confrontation with Plato and the Greek World in the Inaugural Dissertation

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Gualtiero Lorini
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Greek World

The discussion concerning Kant’s knowledge of the Greek world has long been a subject of debate. Our contribution is intended to show that in the Dissertation of 1770 Kant is measured against some currents of Greek thought, and above all with Plato, on topics which will become very important in the articulated development of criticism in the 1770s. One aspect of our analysis deals with the texts that could have filtered Kant’s knowledge of ancient Greek tradition. We will then pore over some crucial features of the Dissertation, such as the distinction between sensible and intelligible knowledge and the ambiguous nature of the intellectualia, in order to assess how Kant’s understanding of certain issues of Greek classicism may have contributed to the outline of some still problematic theses in the text of 1770.

scholarly journals The role of spatial images in R.D. Harris’s novel “Pompeii”

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-67
Author(s):  
E.V. Somova ◽  
E.B. Schemeleva
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
The Real ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
New Material ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
The Mind

The article focuses on the novel “Pompeii” by Robert Dennis Harris which has been little studied in Russia and presents a new material for further research. The purpose of the research is to identify the originality of spatial images in the novel of the British writer. Basing on the comparative historical and analytical methods, the authors of the article explore the main principles of creating historical narration and the specifics of R.D. Harris’s work with historiographical sources while creating a historical epoch; they identify the features of W. Scott and E.G. Bulver-Lytton. Within the context of the study of the originality of spatial topoi in “Pompeii” the authors use extensively the concept of “topoekphrasis”, introduced by O.A. Kling. It distinguishes the place setting as a protagonist who influences greatly the course of events. While analyzing, the authors make the following conclusions about the national condition of the scene given by using ekphrasis and the correlation of the myth with the actual realities in the modern cultural system which indicate the stereotypical thinking of a person in the postmodern society: the myth of Adam and Eve who found themselves in Paradise, associated in the mind of a European with Capri which represents “unearthly” life; the expansion of the semantic fields after reading the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah which describes the destruction of two biblical cities and is brought closer in the novel to the events associated with the real tragedy in Pompeii, undoubtedly show the similarity of its plot resolution with the modern eschatological myth of the Apocalypse, which tells us about the inevitable death of civilization. The analysis of the mythological paradigm of R.D. Harris’s novel "Pompeii", organized by combination of ekphrasis and topoi, discloses the transformation of the postmodernist writer’s worldview, creating a new metaphysical reality in the historical novel. In addition to the real spatial topoi of the ancient world (forum, aqueduct, temple), the postmodern novel reveals mythological images: a labyrinth associated with the ancient Greek story of Theseus; the underground world of the dead, linked to the myth of Charon. The artistic understanding of the historical process by R.D. Harris allows us to identify the originality of the writer’s historical concept in the context of postmodern literature.

scholarly journals PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT OF CAPTIVITY TO THE PROTAGONIST IN EMMA DONOGHUE’S NOVEL ROOM

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-137
Author(s):  
Trivani Desyara ◽  
Zulfan Sahri
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Anxiety Disorder ◽  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Social Anxiety Disorder ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Psychological Effect ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Comfort Zone ◽  
Psychological Condition ◽  
Posttraumatic Disorder

This research aims at identifying, analyzing and describing the psychological condition in Room by Emma Donoghue, and also the causes and effects of the problem which are described in this novel. In the novel, the writer analyze the problem by using theory of Islam (2007), Jung in Emir (2016), and Van Dijk (1997) which explains about psychological effect, psychology, and captivity. This thesis uses qualitative method in analyzing the data to be flatly described to show the evidence of the data identified from the novel. The analysis is conducted by classifying the obtained data in chapter four related to the problems of the study. Hence, there are two kinds of psychological effect and three causes of the effect to be analyzed, i.e. social anxiety disorder and posttraumatic disorder, and the causes are: held captive, domination of Old Nick and hard attempt to escape. The results of this study depict that someone who has a mental illness within himself is not spared from the causes behind them, and be brave to get out from comfort zone to be a better version of your life like what is done by Jack by bravely escaping from the room.

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