Myth Of Medea Research Articles

‘The very worst things’: violence and vulnerability in Djamila Sahraoui’s Yema (2012)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the connections between vulnerability, gender and terrorist violence in relation to Algerian filmmaker Djamila Sahraoui’s Yema (2012). The film is situated in relation to Sahraoui’s oeuvre, and within wider debates around the changing nature of political violence and its representation in Maghrebi and Hollywood cinema. This comparison underlines Yema’s innovatory formal and thematic focus on slow narrative time, sparse aesthetics and fragile, intimate images. The article then examines the concept of vulnerability in relation to terrorism, in particular linking Sahraoui’s choice of formal techniques to the film’s thematic staging of various modes of physical and psychical vulnerability. The allegorical and mythological motifs used in Yema are considered in relation to the gendering of the figures of victim and agent in the film. Through a feminist reconfiguration of the myth of Medea, the article suggests that in the film’s dramatisation of a mother who inflicts suffering, larger questions are raised about personal and political responses to the feelings of exposure that terrorist violence engenders.

Still Expressing the Need for the Rational: Edward Bond’s Dea

Edward Bond’s latest play, Dea, depicts numerous scenes of sex and violence, dramatizing a catastrophic view of the world and questioning the boundaries of madness and moral integrity. Revisiting the Medea myth, the play calls attention to our callousness in the face of the innumerable acts of violence in our contemporary world.

A bölcs, az ördöngös, a gyilkos és a szerelmes

The myth of Medea in old Hungarian poetry occurs only occasionally. Sebestyén Tinódi (1510?–1556) translated the Medieval Historia Troiana by Guido da Columna putting the prose into verse. The Medea-story was incorporated in the myth of the first and second sieges of Troy: the character of the main hero (Jason) is constructed from the panels of hypermasculine Hercules and pious Aeneas. Medea and Dido also keep in close allegorical touch. Kristóf Armbrust adds Medea’s profile to his satirical misogynist poem (1550) with special regards to the dark side of the character. István Koháry (1649–1731) uses the myth as a political allegory: the author draws a parallel between the mythological person cut into pieces by Medea promising to rejuvenate the old body and the dismemberment of the old country. István Gyöngyösi (1629–1704) depicts the myth as a story about fatal love and its ambivalent consequences.

Alabamian Argonautica: Myth and Classical Education in The Quest of the Silver Fleece

W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece offers both a discussion of the value of classical education and an example of it. Du Bois organized the novel around the myth of Jason and Medea but transformed the main characters into newly educated African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. The African-American heroine of the novel, Zora, who performs the role of Medea within the literary context of Ethiopianism, benefits from her liberal education but provides new insights to the curriculum and applications of it. She personifies goals expressed by Du Bois in his treatise The Souls of Black Folk.

A Médea és gyermekei az orosz irodalmi hagyomány tükrében

The article approaches Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Medea and Her Children from the Ancient Greek myth of Medea. The argument starts from the fact that despite the novel’s title, the text shows significant deviation from the story of the original myth. Likewise, the possible reasons for the remarkable differences between the Ancient Greek Medea figure and Ulitskaya’s eponymous heroine is the subject of investigation. It is argued that the differences are due to Ulitskaya’s distinct reliance on classical Russian literature besides the myth in creating her protagonist. The writer establishes intertextual links between her own novel and some outstanding works of Russian literature. As a result of such reminiscences and allusions, Ulitskaya’s heroine represents the moral values and an attitude to life much more typical of classical Russian literature than Antiquity. The article’s author concludes by highlighting that the success of Ulitskaya’s novels can be attributed to the writer’s excellence in combining postmodern literary techniques with the principles of “new realism” – a tendency that follows classical Russian literary traditions.

Medeia escrava: sobre amada de Toni Morrison

The essay proposes a lecture of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, keeping the focus on the evident resemblance that exists between the story written by the contemporary author and the classical myth of Medea, and highlighting the distinctions of each one. The comparison between the two protagonists has already been drawn, more than once, and it is not the first time that a novel, whose protagonist is a woman who has killed her own offspring is compared to the mythical Greek personage. Women’s appeal to the horrible infanticide as a reaction to a tragic situation has been recurrent throughout history and throughout stories. And it is in the dialectic between reality and fiction that it is possible to notice the first big different among the two narratives. While Medea is a mythical character, Sethe – the character created by Toni Morrison – is a fiction based on a real person, on Margaret Garner, who has really killed her daughter, and because of this gesture became an important and almost mythical personage in the struggle of North American abolitionists. The second difference to be highlighted lies in the motivation of the act around which the story revolves: Self-love, in one case; maternal love in another. The third and last major outstanding distinction is directly linked to the first, that is, to the dialectic between fiction and reality. For coming from a story that really happened, the character of Toni Morrison has to face the reaction to her murderous act in the so-called real world, serve sentence in jail and suffer for it in her life. The deus ex-machina solution is reserved for mythical heroines. If there is a god able to save Sethe, it is a quite phenomenal one and goes by the name of Eros.

The law in Euripides’ Medea

This paper investigates appeals to law in Euripides’ Medea, dramatic elements which seem to point to two distinct aspects in the development of Greek Law. The text seems to appeal to: a) archaic law when the oath appears adequate (or sufficient) to establish wedlock, and b) classical law with respect to other aspects of familial jurisprudence. I argue that Euripides has intentionally contrasted these legal perspectives as part of a larger contrasting narrative. Euripides begins by introducing the essentials features of the myth of Medea in terms of its archaic context. In the latter half, he then in turn contrasts this narrative with contemporary views, and thus offers a critical reflection upon his own culture and society. These contrasting narratives are further supported by highlightening an important transition in the text, which focuses on Themis and Dike and the importance of laws.

Medea in "Aracoeli"? Note (senza rete) per una possibile traccia mitologica in Elsa Morante

The article tries to define the presence of a mythological mark in Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli . Therefore the discussion will highlight the connections and the deviations existing between the myth of Medea and the novel by Morante. We will try to define a new approach to Aracoeli .

Indios by Linda Hogan (review)

Reviewed by: Indios by Linda Hogan Sravani Biswas Linda Hogan. Indios. San Antonio, Texas: Wings Press, 2012. 62p. Linda Hogan is a Native American poet. She is also a master story-teller, playwright, novelist and an environmentalist. Her book Indios is an expression of all these traits compressed together, which gives the reader a novel experience. Is it a long dramatic monologue, written in blank verse? Is it a novella with such meaningful gaps that the reader becomes the author, and through imagination is able to create for herself the long painful story of the indigenous tribes of America? Or is it the voice of the environmentalist who, with a deep urgency, appeals to the ‘civilized’ colonizer not to destroy nature and the indigenous knowledge system of a tribe that had, till then, taken care of both man and nature? Hogan dedicates her book to all aboriginal women who, she is sure, know the story of the captive woman accused of killing her children. This story resonates with the echo of the Greek mythological story of Medea as told by Euripides. Yet it is Hogan’s own individual creation because she has successfully distilled an old local story through the famous Medea myth, and thus has made its appeal universal. She does not stop here. Rather, she subverts the story of Euripides and saves Medea and the captivated aboriginal woman from a false stigma. Indios is a dramatic monologue – the stage being the prison cell and the prisoner speaking to a journalist named Clare Finley. The style is as successful as that of Browning, but while Browning stuck to the English Romantic twilight of [End Page 229] the Victorian era, Hogan’s voice echoes round the world wherever colonization has affected and almost erased the identities of the indigenous inhabitants. She successfully includes the interviewer’s reaction in the story of Indios in an indirect manner. When Indios says – “Life hasn’t hardened me here” (3) the reader imagines the face of the interviewer awestruck by the still lingering beauty of the prisoner. Like Medea, Indios too is an exceptional woman. She would not plead for innocence. She has indeed committed murder, but she has not killed her children. At this point we hear the voice of Indios subverting the famous Medea myth retold by Euripides, which of course is patriarchal in tone. In Euripides, Medea is the enchantress who kills her children. The story of Indios also reverberates with other local myths like that of a legendary Hispanic beauty who marries a ranchero and kills her own children, or the myth of Pocahontas, the Virginia Indian who saved and married a captive named John Smith and then converted to Christianity. Levis Strauss showed how myths of different countries are enjoined by expressing the elementary structures of the human mind. All the above mentioned myths reveal woman as the betrayer who leaves her own people to marry an outsider. She falls outside the category of the normal, for she is an enchantress and even capable of killing her own children or refusing to return to her own tribe. When the symbolic discourse of a myth turns to rational discourse in the form of written words, its dynamism is marred by the hegemonic ideology of the society of which the writer is a member. In the western patriarchal paradigm, it is the story of the deviant woman. But Hogan’s writing subverts this tendency and shows how, in all these myths, the women are destroyed because of their love for their husbands and their children. Indios is a tragedy turned inside out. It is the strong and tragic woman’s voice that holds center stage, a reversal of her role in world famous tragedies where women remain as shadows to the male counterparts dramatizing their fall. Hogan’s use of myth helps her transcend the single voice. The single voice of Indios merges with all the voices of Native Americans, especially the women. As the colonizer is attracted to the gold mines, she too is innocently attracted to the ‘golden man,’ i.e. the white skinned male. This is her flaw. To the colonizer she is exotic, but at the same...

MEDEA AND APARTHEID

Since the time of the ancient Greeks themselves, Greek myth and dramas based on Greek myth have continued to provide inspiration to authors and artists. In the case of the Medea myth, Euripides' adaptation in his famous tragedy, first produced at the Great Dionysia in Athens in 431 BC, proved to be so successful that he may be said to have created a new standard version of the Medea myth which was recognized by all subsequent artists who made use of the myth.!

Der erste Mord

No AccessDer erste MordDer Tod des Apsyrtos als Schlüsselmoment für moderne Interpretationen des Medea-Mythos: Jahnn, Pasolini,Wolf, LoherMira ShahMira ShahSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:May 2014https://doi.org/10.13109/kult.2014.14.1.43SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 14Issue 1March 2014 ISSN: 1616-1203eISSN: 2196-7970HistoryPublished online:May 2014 PDF download

Filicide in Euripides’ Medea : A Biopoetic Approach

In one of the three tragedies by Euripides performed at Athens in 431 BCE, the playwright presented his version of the story of Jason and Medea. He did not begin with their meeting in Colchis, the place to which Jason had sailed on a quest set by Pelias to retrieve the Golden Fleece and thereby, he believed, to regain his kingship of Iolcus. Nor did he begin with Jason and Medea's arrival back in Greece and the troubles they encountered in their failed attempt to regain his patrimony from the usurper-king who sent him on his quest. Rather, Euripides begins his tragedy with Jason and Medea, now with two young sons, in Corinth, clearly sometime after they had fled as exiles from Iolcus. The play opens with Medea's long-time confidante, her Nurse, ruing the day that Jason entered Medea's life, for now, it seems, he has casually cast her aside in favor of making a new marriage with the daughter of Corinth's ruler. This is the terrible deed that spurs Medea to action. Abandoned by her husband, her sole provider of parental and financial support, she retaliates, bringing to bear any means at her disposal to hurt those who have hurt her--not only her husband and his new bride and father-in-law, but even, necessarily, Medea's own children. Euripides' portrayal of the title character in Medea has, it has been argued, influenced all further versions of the Medea myth, especially her association with Corinth, the death of her children by her own hand, and her escape in the Sun's chariot. (1) Of Euripides' new elements of characterization, it was the filicide of her children that most completely determined perceptions of Medea's essential character. This particular event has inspired a significant number of scholarly discussions of the play, offering a variety of ways to read the tragedy from the perspective of both ancient and modern audiences. For instance, because of her act of child-murder, many modern critics have consistently viewed Medea as a woman who loses more than she gains, for example, as she sacrifices her femininity to the pursuit of more properly masculine concerns. (2) A number of critics point to the irrevocable loss of Medea's humanity, (3) but as Carrie Cowherd (1983, 135) observes, the fact that Medea is no longer a mother does not entail she is no longer human. Several critics provide a specifically feminist reading of the play, interpreting Medea as an everywoman suffering under a patriarchal regime, (4) while others argue that such a feminist interpretation is too ideologically narrow.5 In addition to contemporary gender questions, politicized postmodern criticism has focused on perceived ethnicity issues, especially on Greek self-definition in contrast to the 'barbarian.' While some critics identify important ambiguities of ethnicity in her characterization, (6) others argue that ethnicity is peripheral or irrelevant to Medea's story. (7) In the following discussion, we offer an analysis of Medea's response to her situation through an evolutionary literary critical approach. Evolutionary literary criticism (biopoetics), which is based on the findings of evolutionary psychology, holds that humans universally share innate feelings and motivations. Because of this, while evolutionary psychology can illuminate literary study, the universality of particular elements of fiction can contribute to a better understanding of human nature. (8) This interface between evolutionary psychology and narrative has the potential to offer a new way of appreciating and explaining Medea's perennial appeal as a literary character of depth and complexity. By considering Medea's actions and motivations as reflecting the sociobiological drives shared by humans as evolved animals, we offer an explanation for why this story has simultaneously so fascinated and disgusted us for so long: it is a story informed by the irreconcilability of conflicting biologically evolved behavior in relation to reproductive success and parental investment. …

Medea en la encrucijada. Entre la autoafirmación y el autosacrificio: una metáfora de la subjetividad femenina en pugna

The following essay aims to make an analytical approach to the myth of Medea from the hermeneuticsof psychoanalysis in feminist perspective. It is also an invitation to think the archetypalfigure of Medea as a metaphor for social change and transformation of androcentric paradigm.Nowadays, this paradigm is installed with greater force into the generation of women, to whichI belong. In that sense, this essay constitutes an attempt to review the text of Euripides fromthe psychoanalytic hermeneutic examination of female subjectivity. The main emphasis is onthe critique of a culturally accepted principle: the gender complementarity, which establishesand places man as the subject and woman as the object.

Medea: ¿bruja asesina o fármacos? Deconstrucción del mito en Christa Wolf

El mito clásico de Medea ha sido objeto de múltiples tratamientos en los que generalmente se le representa como una bruja astuta y vengativa, portadora y causante de males. No obstante, la escritora Christa Wolf reactiva en su novela Medea. Stimmen elementos del mito que han caído en el olvido. Wolf reestructura el mito y muestra cómo las instituciones de poder legitiman sus abusos por medio de él y buscan culpables para librarse de la responsabilidad de los problemas que aquejan a una sociedad. De ahí que nazca la necesidad de expulsar chivos expiatorios que se pueden identificar con la antigua figura griega del fármacos.

‘A Simple Girl’? Medea in Ovid Heroides 12

For Homer's Circe the story of Argo's voyage was already well known. Although we cannot be sure that the Odyssey's first audience was aware of Medea's role in Jason's story, we do know that by the time that Ovid came to write Heroides, she had already appeared in numerous Greek and Latin texts, in epic and lyric poetry and on the tragic stage. Given her complex textual and dramatic history, it seems hardly likely that any Ovidian Medea could actually be ‘a simple girl'. And yet precisely this charge of ‘simplicity’ has been levelled against Heroides 12 and its Active author. I propose to argue that the Medea of Heroides 12 is complex, not simple, and that her complexity derives from the fact that Ovid has positioned his elegiac heroine between past and future, guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy.Like all of Ovid's heroines, Medea writes at a critical juncture in her mythic life. But Medea's myth differs significantly from those of her fellow authors, for it requires her to play five distinct roles in four separate locations. Thus while Penelope, for example, plays only the part of Ulysses' loyal wife on Ithaca immediately before and during her husband's return, Medea plays the ‘simple girl’ in Colchis, the murderous wife in Iolcus, the abandoned mother in Corinth, the poisonous stepmother in Athens and the potential filicide back in Colchis. She is a heroine with a well-known and extensive history and so it is not surprising that the first line of Heroides 12 invokes the concept of memory: memini (‘I remember’).

Epilogue: The Multiple Medeas of the Middle Ages

Insofar as we can know, Medea has always been multiple, existing in many different versions simultaneously. She is never simply a literary construction, a stratified intertextual ensemble made up of all the other literary Medeas that came before her, but a product of the values and fears of each culture that imagines her, recreates her, and uses her to represent meaning. The Middle Ages were no different: Medea could figure as an alchemist's guide, as in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella (the New Pearl of Great Price); as an allegory of God fighting the Antichrist in the Ovide Moralisé; as wronged wife in Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; or as a nightmare figure that appears like Grendel in Beowulf to destroy Jason's wedding feast in Raoul Lefèvre's History of Jason. The flexibility of the medieval myth of Medea is staggering—even more staggering than that of the Roman period—stretched as it was across a continent of warring kingdoms, with different authors and audiences pressing classical texts to generate new and culturally relevant and acceptable meanings. However, appropriately enough for a volume titled ‘Roman Medea’, there is one multiple of Medea that drops out of the equation as a direct influence: the Greek Medea, the Medea of Euripides and Apollonius. The loss of the Greek tradition did not impede medieval authors, who found more than enough in Latin texts to inspire them. The basic Latin materials upon which the Middle Ages built their Medeas were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, along with scattered references in other popular authors like Statius, presentations of irrational women in love like Dido in Virgil, descriptions of child murderers such as Procne also taken from the Metamorphoses, and terrifying witches such as Lucan's Erictho. However, some Latin texts which we might have expected to be influential, such as Seneca's Medea, were marginal to the medieval tradition.

Seneca in Cuba: Gender, Race, and the Revolution in José Triana's Medea en el espejo

This article places renewed emphasis on the gender and racial dynamics in José Triana's Medea en el espejo (Medea in the Mirror; Havana, 1960) by examining its relationship to Lucius Annaeus Seneca's Medea, a major source of inspiration for the Cuban dramatist that has been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. It demonstrates that Triana appropriates the image of Medea as a vengeful witch from the Roman text and accordingly constructs a heroine oscillating between antithetical subject positions: man and woman, master and slave, self and other. Situating the play in its sociopolitical context, the article argues that the indeterminacy of Triana's heroine, a mulata named María, for artistic and cultural reasons, is symptomatic of Cuba's liminal position and the collapse of hierarchical distinctions with the advent of the revolution in 1959, a temporal border that marked the beginning of a new era and caused the blurring of social boundaries. Triana, I conclude, revisits the myth of Medea and uses it as a vehicle for raising questions about the abuse of power and the continuous suppression of black agency under Castro.

Shaping a New Communal Identity

Velina Hasu Houston, a Los Angeles-based American writer, is often regarded as a multicultural or postmodern playwright because of the characteristics of her works written from her transnational or multiracial point of view, but she posits herself as a feminist writer, resisting the labels such as “multicultural artist” or “postmodernist” that may force every “ethnic theater” into an “artistic ghetto.” She creates works revealing struggles and frustrations of transnational, multicultural and multiracial women in the white male-centered society, dreaming of a new world community where they are treated equally and with respect. Houston challenges to accepted practices by exploring theatrical innovations in her pursuit of an identity that dissolves any border. In her most successful play, Tea, her heroine, a ghost, who, having killed her husband and lost her daughter, committed suicide, crosses the border between this world and that world, listening to the interactions of four other Japanese women who are visiting her house. Scenes go back and forth; in some scenes five women enact the roles of their husbands and daughters. Such use of scenes defies chronological order; the use of geographically unfixed sets and multiple roles played by a single performer are features often seen in contemporary feminist theater. She often re-envisions the gender relations of ancient myth and creates a new myth where individuals “transgress borders of nations and identity, forming new communities that often defy categorization.” Mina in The House of Chaos, based on the Medea myth, is a Japanese woman who defeats her husband and his male ally who conspired to drive her away to rob her of the firm she had inherited from her Japanese family. Mina's spirit of resistance will be passed on to her daughter. Keiko in Calling Aphrodite, a survived victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, has a fictional confidante in Aphrodite, a Greek goddess of beauty, who advises her to foster “hope.” The play reveals Houston's effort to find an ethical solution to such a difficult issue as the bombing of Hiroshima by looking at it from an angle of how one can overcome atrocious memories of war and heal pain. Houston, thus, uncovers the pain in racial antagonisms, cultural wars, social conflicts, family problems, etc. in our time, tackling complicated matters that today's women, especially multiracial, multiethnic, and transnational women are faced with, and hoping for the formation of a borderless community with new communal understandings.

Ist eine Medea ohne Kindermord überhaupt denkbar? Medea-Morphosen bei Euripides und Christa Wolf. Oder: Freispruch für Euripides

The aim of this study is to discuss the significance of the child-murder for the Medea myth. For this purpose two of the most important adaptations of the myth are examined: Euripides’ tragedy and Christa Wolf’s novel (1996). The study attempts to shed new light on the invention of this mythologeme by Euripides. Contrary to the acceptance of the majority of the researchers this study assumes Euripides' Medea is not just a bourgeois marriage drama, but a political and social sketch of the microcosm of the Polis. Using various „messages in a bottle “Euripides succeeded in emphasizing on the needs of the suppressed ones and opening a new perspective for the female element. While however in the male tradition, from Euripides to von Trier, the suppressed comes to the light as cruelty, Wolf suggests another model of feminity. As a result her protagonist does not need the childmurder any longer. The myth is not a context, but a frame. Therefore all versions belong to the myth. In a time characterized by violence and fear, Wolf turns the attention to the origins of violence by setting other priorities, while telling the story of a person, which frightens both men and women.

Os Argonautas, de Apolônio de Rodes, e a tradição literária

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>O objetivo deste artigo é investigar a tradição poética da Grécia que diz respeito ao mito de Jasão e Medeia. Assim, será analisado o jogo intertextual entre a epopeia alexandrina – representada pela obra <em>Os Argonautas</em>, de Apolônio de Rodes – e as poesias homérica, hesiódica e pindárica e também a tragédia euripidiana Medeia e os idílios XIII e XXII de Teócrito.</span></p><p><span><br /></span></p><p><strong>Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonauts and literary tradition </strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>The aim of this paper is to investigate the Greek poetic tradition of the myth of Jason and Medea. This paper also analyzes the intertextual relationships between the Alexandrian Epic - represented by Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonauts - and the Homeric poems, Hesiod and </span>Pindar and also the Euripidean tragedy Medea and the idylls of Theocritus XIII and XXII.</p><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span><strong>Keywords:</strong> Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonauts; Alexandrian epic poems; intertextuality. </span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p><span><br /></span></p></div></div></div>