E//O

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2000

The archaic story of the Thracian musician Orpheus and his bride Eurydice is heard first as an ancient myth of marriage and death, wedding and separation. The mixture of expectation and dread in its sentiments is sounded still today in the contemporary wedding songs and funeral laments of the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Similar sequences of engagement and withdrawal, ascent and descent, change and metamorphosis are found in the adventures and vicissitudes of other mythic figures. Its premise of the soul's transmigration and its promise of psychic transformation inspired the religious ruminations and philosophic speculation of many centuries. The shifting keys in the songs of Orpheus and the cries of Eurydice score the shocking emotions of epiphanal moments, the creative 'agon', and a depth psychological passage. With its crescendos and denouements, the Orpheus/Eurydice phenomenon suggests the range of experience as one both engages reality and reaches toward meaning.

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, 2017

Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, 2023

First immortalised by Virgil in his fourth Georgic (ca. 39-30 BC), the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has captured the imaginations of artists for centuries. Conditioned by the age in which they were produced, many songs, plays, poems, and operas have been composed to honour this tragic love story. Among others, British playwright Zinnie Harris, in her 2017 play Meet Me at Dawn, draws her inspiration from this legendary love story. Defying the gender politics of the myth and the time, Harris reframes the characters in a more modern context and constructs both Orpheus and Eurydice as women. Whilst questioning what one would do if they were given another chance to be reunited with a beloved one who died suddenly, the play further explores the themes of bereavement, grief, and grieving by using the mythological love story as an allegorical scaffold. Drawing on Freud's model of bereavement and the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, this paper reflects on the embodiment of grief and grieving in the aftermath of a loss as manifested in Meet Me at Dawn arguing that it provides an exegesis of the validity of this particular model.

Classica et Mediaevalia, 1985

Spenser Studies

This article addresses Spenser's curious preference for the lesserknown Greek version of the Orpheus myth, in which Orpheus successfully recovers Eurydice from the Underworld, over the tragic version promulgated by Virgil's Georgics, exploring its significance in the middle books of The Faerie Queene and its implications for Spenser's conception of his role as an "Orphic" poet. The rescue of Amoret from the House of Busirane and that of Florimel from Proteus's cave both rework Eurydice's release. Spenser's chief concern is to differentiate between true and false love, which he identifies respectively with sympathy and with rapacious desire. Britomart's capacity for sympathy and respect for Amoret's freedom as a desiring subject enable her to perform the role of the liberating Orpheus, while Scudamour's actions at the Temple of Venus are implicitly paralleled with Aristaeus's attempted rape in Virgil's account. In Book IV, Florimel's lament brings out the connection of this sympathetic form of love with Orpheus's traditional powers of poetic pathos, while the Orphic poet's ability to promote a similar equity and "franchise" on the social and political level are evoked through allusion to Orpheus's quelling of the Argonauts's strife. Where Virgil's fourth Georgic opposes political necessity to love and art, Spenser challenges this dichotomy. In assuming the role of the "Brittayne Orpheus," and reasserting Orpheus's victory over death, he dedicates his

Journal of Literature and Art Studies

Rilke's Orpheus sonnet 27 runs, "Does it truly exist: time the destroyer? / When topples the tower atop the peaceful height? / This heart belonging to the gods forever,/ When will the demi-urge send it with dire might?" And it is precisely on the destructing force of time that Jennifer Egan constructs her narrative upon. A Visit From the Goon Squad is exactly Orpheus and Eurydice's myth revisited, and she focuses on the tragedy of decline in 21st century America. A variety of characters unfulfilled lives conform the map of New York City, and Orpheus lyre has become a rock and roll group, The Conduits, as a sort of misconnecting force in the lives of them all. A careful literary distance gives an impressionistic vision of inevitability and opportunity lost. My approach focuses on the different interpretations of the classic myth, and on how Rilke's rhetorical questions offer an eclectic and metallic answer in Jennifer Egan's contemporary view.

Mythological Studies Journal, 2011

WOMEN WHO MADE HISTORY, edited by Umberto Mondini, 2020

MYTHS AND EMOTIONS, 2017

In my contribution to the discussions about myths and emotions, I will focus on two major contemporary French writers, Claude Simon and Hélène Cixous. Claude Simon (1913-2005) received his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985. Hélène Cixous (born in 1937) is one of the highly influ­ential and internationally recognized feminist figures. In addition, Jacques Derrida designated her as the most important contemporary French writer. We are thus dealing with two major representatives of contemporary lit­erary trends in France. Yet, regardless of scholarly appreciation for their literature, which is often quite difficult and almost hermetic, they certainly do not represent household names. The fact that they have been considered, at different times of their careers, as members of particular literary circles, affected the way they were judged or eventually catalogued. Hence my at­tempt to shed a potentially different light on their endeavors and also show connections between their approaches that may have been disregarded in the past.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2016

J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg (1994) is a text about a father (Dostoevsky) mourning the death of his son. I am interested in the presence and meaning of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the novel, compared to the meaning of the myth in R. M. Rilke's poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes." (1904). I read the unaccomplished encounter between Orpheus and Eurydice as a story that portrays the failed intersubjectity plot of Coetzee's novel(s). Following Blanchot's reading of the myth, I examine the contrasting Orphean and Eurydicean conducts-Orpheus desiring but, at the same time, destroying the other and Eurydice declining the other's approach. I argue that Orpheus's and Eurydice's contrasting behaviours can be looked at as manifestations of a failure of love, one for its violence, the other for its neglect, and thus the presence of the myth in The Master of Petersburg is meaningful in what it says about the theme of intersubjectivity in Coetzee's oeuvre.