“Lázaro: eu sou a tua morte”: imagens de Lázaro em Sylvia Plath e Hilda Hilst

Neste artigo apresentamos algumas reflexões sobre a releitura do personagem bíblico Lázaro em duasproduções literárias do século 20: o poema “Lady Lazarus”, de Sylvia Plath, e a narrativa Lázaro, de Hilda Hilst. Por meio dessa leitura comparada —que aqui se apresenta não tanto uma estrutura fechada de tópicos, mas sim em fragmentos reflexivos abertos, acentuados por certo exercício de estilo—, procuramos mostrar e comentar formas modernas de apropriação de uma narrativa que remonta aos primórdios da cultura ocidental. Para reforçar o elemento intertextual, tangenciamos outras releituras sobre o mesmo personagem, e, principalmente, recorremos a ponderações sobre as temáticas da angústia e da morte. O percurso reflexivo mostra uma apropriação de Lázaro que se constrói em caráter de subversão, mantendo a ressurreição do personagem não para mostrar o triunfo da vida sobre a morte, mas sim o seu oposto.

Mulheres escritoras em diferentes esferas discursivas

Pensando no papel da fotografia na construção e reforço de múltiplos discursos, este artigo busca expandir a análise de Walter Benjamin em Pequena história da fotografia sobre a foto de atelier do escritor Franz Kafka. A consideração sobre o olhar triste e desolado de Kafka contrastando com o cenário planejado, para proporcionar uma imagem de aura luxuosa e enfeitada, trouxe um questionamento ampliado que este artigo busca responder: analisando pessoas que escreveram sobre si mesmas, quais são os pontos de contato e de divergência entre autorrepresentação por meio da escrita e pelo olhar dos outros por meio da câmera e das fotografias? Por ser de caráter ainda obscuro, o foco da investigação são autoras de diferentes épocas com estilos distintos entre si: Anne Frank e suas fotografias familiares, Sylvia Plath e o estabelecimento de um ideal feminino por meio das aparências e, por fim, a artista punk Patti Smith e os Estados Unidos como cenário mutável e de “refugo”. Para discorrer sobre os relatos dessas mulheres sobre si mesmas e suas imagens estabelecidas na história, este artigo recorre aos ensaios de Susan Sontag, relacionando fotografia, contexto histórico e literatura.

THREE HOSPITAL POEMS: EMPOWERED CONFESSIONAL SELVES IN ROBERT LOWELL’S „WAKING IN THE BLUE”, ANNE SEXTON’S „YOU, DOCTOR MARTIN” AND SYLVIA PLATH’S „NEVER TRY TO TRICK ME WITH A KISS”

This article examines three hospital poems by the American confessionalists Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Writing in the mid1950s, they opted for „unacceptable” topics which were related to their personal experiences. Typically, the poetry of these poets remains as challenging for the modern reader as it was for their contemporaries. In introducing shocking events and intimate details to their work, they made an important development to portraying lived experience in fiction, which did not come without attacks for their perceived „narcissism”. In this article I argue that their bold writing about difficult subjects has created empowered poetic selves which rather than reflect any narcissism on part of the authors, predate and invite interpretations of the „other”. Their reproduction of illness (depression) is, consequently, devoid of the standard metaphors associated with the respective disease.

Sylvia Plath and the Containment of Women's Domestic Identity

Within the unstable sphere of 1950s Cold War political tensions, American women became the 'bastion of safety in an insecure world' (Tyler May 2008: p.9). For politicians such as Richard Nixon, women's loyalty to the home served as a commitment to America, negotiating a settlement which secured women within the confinements of domestic duties. This ideal, advertised through compelling magazine articles, manipulatively enabled a universal identity for women based within the home. Pages packed with the latest consumer products and laced with 'smooth artificiality... cool glamour, and the apple-pie happy domesticity' (Bronfen 2004: p.115) birthed a rich propaganda for domestic containment. Examining the political climate of Cold War America through the lens of domestic containment, this article argues that American poet Sylvia Plath tackled the illusions of consumerism to fuel her writing, challenging outright gender inequality which defined the nation.Using Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique alongside genuine articles from the era, this article assesses the ideological conflict of the 1950s domesticated woman against Plath's personal battle between writing and domestic life. Through her raw depictions of realism in literature and intense poetry, it becomes impossible to 'contain' Plath, not only within the domestic sphere, but in her own writing.

Art and Suicide

Chapter 8 looks at specific ways in which art can sometimes be crazy-making, with a detailed examination of three artist suicides. Research on artists and suicide, specifically, is sparse. We know as little about any artist’s reasons as we do about anyone else’s, but a few studies are have been done. And at least actuarially, in relation to level of overall risk, the good studies provide some helpful grounding. To get at a range of possible dynamics, none universal, in this chapter the author inspects the particular cases of Diane Arbus, Kurt Cobain, and Sylvia Plath. Specifically, the author examines how suicide sometimes comes at the end of a process of artistic redefinition. The artist tries something new, in terms of form or content, apparatus or theme, and the product, so unlike anything he or she has attempted before, seems at first outrageously right and satisfying. Sometimes that feeling lasts, sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, the new development occasions a risky and not necessarily valid reassessment of all prior artistic activity.

The Birthday Letters Myth

<p>Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters (1998) has, for the most part, been judged in terms of its autobiographical content rather than for its poetic achievement. The poems are addressed to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 shortly after they separated. The poems describe their relationship and deal with the aftermath of her suicide and Hughes's role in managing and promoting her writings, in many of which he was characterised as a villain. Hughes has been criticised for his subjective treatment of these events in Birthday Letters. Furthermore, the drama of the poems takes place in an apparently fatalistic universe which has led to accusations that Hughes uses fatalism in order to create a deterministic explanation for Plath's suicide and absolve himself. In The Birthday Letters Myth I will be arguing that Hughes's mythopoeia in Birthday Letters is part of his overtly subjective challenge to the discourses that have hitherto provided the "story" of his life. In Birthday Letters, there are two versions of Hughes: the younger Hughes who is character involved in the drama, and the older Hughes, looking back on his life, interpreting 'omens' and 'portents' and creating a meaningful narrative from the chaos. By his own method, Hughes highlights the subjectivity and retrospective determinism of those narratives (or 'myths') about his life that often uncritically adopt the dramatic dialectic of' victim' and 'villain' in Plath's poems. In Birthday Letters, Hughes adopts the symbols and drama from Plath's writings in order to create his own dramatic "myth" that resists contamination from the other discourses that have perpetuated the drama within her poems. The underlying myth of Birthday Letters is the shamanic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hughes believed the role of the poet and that of the shaman were analogous and in Birthday Letters, as Orpheus, he goes on an imaginary journey to recover his private assumptions and conclusions about his relationship with Plath. In doing so, he achieves a redemptive, cathartic healing image for himself and the reader.</p>

The Birthday Letters Myth

<p>Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters (1998) has, for the most part, been judged in terms of its autobiographical content rather than for its poetic achievement. The poems are addressed to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 shortly after they separated. The poems describe their relationship and deal with the aftermath of her suicide and Hughes's role in managing and promoting her writings, in many of which he was characterised as a villain. Hughes has been criticised for his subjective treatment of these events in Birthday Letters. Furthermore, the drama of the poems takes place in an apparently fatalistic universe which has led to accusations that Hughes uses fatalism in order to create a deterministic explanation for Plath's suicide and absolve himself. In The Birthday Letters Myth I will be arguing that Hughes's mythopoeia in Birthday Letters is part of his overtly subjective challenge to the discourses that have hitherto provided the "story" of his life. In Birthday Letters, there are two versions of Hughes: the younger Hughes who is character involved in the drama, and the older Hughes, looking back on his life, interpreting 'omens' and 'portents' and creating a meaningful narrative from the chaos. By his own method, Hughes highlights the subjectivity and retrospective determinism of those narratives (or 'myths') about his life that often uncritically adopt the dramatic dialectic of' victim' and 'villain' in Plath's poems. In Birthday Letters, Hughes adopts the symbols and drama from Plath's writings in order to create his own dramatic "myth" that resists contamination from the other discourses that have perpetuated the drama within her poems. The underlying myth of Birthday Letters is the shamanic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hughes believed the role of the poet and that of the shaman were analogous and in Birthday Letters, as Orpheus, he goes on an imaginary journey to recover his private assumptions and conclusions about his relationship with Plath. In doing so, he achieves a redemptive, cathartic healing image for himself and the reader.</p>

Meaning-making narratives within a puzzle of parts: A psychobiographical sketch of Sylvia Plath

This study aimed to unveil Sylvia Plath’s (1932–1963) meaning-making narratives, within her life’s puzzle of parts, by utilising the Internal Family System (IFS) model of Schwartz. Plath was purposively selected as subject since she has been proclaimed as one of the most renowned and influential voices in 20th century Anglo-American culture and literature. Although she only published one collection of poems, “The Collosus”, and one novel, “The Bell Jar”, in her lifetime, the plethora of short stories, poems, journal entries and letters which were published after her suicide secured her status as a powerful and creative voice. Methodological strategies utilised to sort and integrate the wealth of publically-available socio-historical data on Plath included the analysis of psychobiographical indicators of salience according to the model of Irving Alexander and the data analysis matrix procedure of Robert Yin. Findings suggest that each stage of Plath’s life was characterised by “parts-led” functioning as a result of transferred burdens, imperfect care-taking, existential anxiety and traumatic emotional experiences. This resulted in polarisation of her different parts, which blocked the healing energy of her Self and aggravated feelings of worthlessness, in spite of her creative meaning-making narratives. Since Sylvia used her creative genius to address socio-historical issues and injustices, her life lends itself to meaning-making narratives, especially those that empower and inspire future generations of previously disempowered groups.