Apis mellifera (Rilke, Leśmian, Valéry, Miłosz)

This essay concerns Paul Valéry’s sonnet The Bee, a fragment of Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to Witold Hulewicz, Boleslaw Lesmian’s poem The Bees, and a fragment of Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Orpheus and Eurydice. Investigating the semantics and symbolism of the bee, a trope common to each text, allows for a reading of a broader ontological project: the relationship between being and non-being. This essay centres on denying the division between being and non-being, proposing the concept of a greater whole instead.

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>

Parallels and Distinctions in Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy and “Orpheus and Eurydice”

Criticism of Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy alongside the Greek mythological story of “Orpheus and Eurydice” has usually been an engagement in drawing parallels between both texts, or of uncovering symbols and allusions found within the novel that echoes the Greek myth. None, however, has explored at the same time the range of similarities and dissimilarities between both narratives; nor is there available a sustained attention devoted to the criticism of both. This study fills that critical vacuum. The question thus opened up is that there are convergences as well as divergences in the narratives; and although Season of Anomy is not without borrowings from the Greek mythology which constitutes the convergences and to some extent informs some of the divergences, the novel’s trajectory and imaginative framework transcend the classical story. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the figure of “double destinations” under her theory of intertextuality is brought into play in this study to make sense of the parities and disparities between both accounts.

“Not Orphée.” “No, Never Him.”: Reclaiming Female Agency From Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” in Alice Munro’s “the Chidlren Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire

[Introductory paragraph] In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. —Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours Metamorphoses can be understood as “the action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance [and especially] transformation by supernatural means” (OED). Ovid’s Metamorphoses focuses on the changing of bodies to other physical forms, but Ovid’s tales of transformation have themselves been transformed into other literary and cultural forms. This paper will pull together different disciplines such as classical, literary, and film studies to examine Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” from the Metamorphoses, and the formalist and feminist adaptations of the tale by women about women: Alice Munro’s short story “The Children Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Munro and Sciamma give their female heroines the agency and voices they lacked in Ovid’s text, where there is a pattern of violence against women, who are silenced usually through some form of destructive transformations of their bodies.

“Not Orphée.” “No, Never Him.”: Reclaiming Female Agency From Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” in Alice Munro’s “the Chidlren Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire

[Introductory paragraph] In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. —Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours Metamorphoses can be understood as “the action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance [and especially] transformation by supernatural means” (OED). Ovid’s Metamorphoses focuses on the changing of bodies to other physical forms, but Ovid’s tales of transformation have themselves been transformed into other literary and cultural forms. This paper will pull together different disciplines such as classical, literary, and film studies to examine Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” from the Metamorphoses, and the formalist and feminist adaptations of the tale by women about women: Alice Munro’s short story “The Children Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Munro and Sciamma give their female heroines the agency and voices they lacked in Ovid’s text, where there is a pattern of violence against women, who are silenced usually through some form of destructive transformations of their bodies.

Hadestown

Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin’s musical reimagination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, sidelines the issue of white supremacy in its explorations of economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and collective action.

METHODS AND TECHNIQUES OF MYTHOLOGIZATION IN S. RUSHDIE’S NOVEL ‘THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET’

The study is devoted to the analysis of methods and techniques of mythologization in the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet written by the British author of Indian origin S. Rushdie. The paper explores the narrative organization of the novel, in which images and motifs of ancient mythology are used as a special code for artistic interpretation of European culture of the second half of the 20th century. The article examines the artistic reality of the novel, which combines the modern history of rock culture and classical mythology of Ancient Greece. S. Rushdie addresses problems related to the nature of creativity using as the main plot-forming motifs such mythologemes as the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth of alldevouring Tartarus, twin myths. The study shows that a typical technique for creating expressive threedimensional multivocal images in Rushdie's novel is a combination of real facts from the world of rock culture and mythological allusions, intertwining, overlapping and collision of various motifs and plots of Greek mythology, which, taken all together, generates the original artistic reality. The article analyzes how the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice acquires a cultural dimension in the novel and what techniques are used by the author to activate the extensive cultural memory of the Orphic myth. The concentration and interpretation of iconic images and motifs of ancient mythology are used in the novel for artistic analysis of the state of culture in the second half of the 20th century and of its attempts to counter the catastrophic tendencies of destruction and death of the modern civilization.

On the History of P.Chevalier de Brissol’s Ballet “The Village Heroine” (1800)

The article is devoted to the history of the creation and compositional features of P.Chevalier de Brissol’s ballet to the music of G.A. Pari “The Village Heroine”. Information was collected and clarified on the performances of the play, its authors and performers. Discrepancies were revealed in the studies (the date and place of the premiere, the number of acts, the names of choreographers and composers do not match). The creative continuity of the choreographers in working with the plot is noted and documentary information on the resumption of the ballet performed by A. Poireau, I. Walberh and A. Glushkovsky is provided. The libretto compositions were found and studied. In the article, the history of the plot related to the opera of P.Monsigny “Deserter”, the ballet of the same name by J.Doberval and other works are considered. For the first time, little-known handwritten musical sources of the ballet and its musical material are discussed. Textual features were studied, including handwritten litters containing the names of the creators, the dates of the ballet, as well as a rare autograph of the composer and bandmaster I. F. Kerzelli. The place of the composition in the work of Pari is determined and the conclusion is made that the musical score was compiled from the well-known works of different authors. In search of the authors of musical fragments, a complete verification of the score of the opera by P.Monsigny “Deserter” and the musical source “Village Heroine” was conducted. In the course of checking the score, a quote from the opera “Orpheus and Eurydice” by C.W. Gluck was discovered. The advantages of instrumentation and musical drama of ballet, built on thorough development and a system of thematic reprise, are revealed. It is established that Pari wrote music for its sequel — the ballet in three acts “The Consequence of the Village Heroine” (1806?), choreographed by Poireau and Valberkh.