Aesthetics and Death: Idealization, Horror and the Tragic Tetrad in Hippolytus
[...]image-work is an act of possession and displacement, a rape of reality or the self that, like the rape by Poseidon of Medusa transfigures and leads to transfigurative art. "8 Image-making is magic (magike tekne); the doublings, reflections and representations at its core, rooted in seeing,...
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| Published in: | Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics 2010, Vol.33 (1/2), p.45 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | [...]image-work is an act of possession and displacement, a rape of reality or the self that, like the rape by Poseidon of Medusa transfigures and leads to transfigurative art. "8 Image-making is magic (magike tekne); the doublings, reflections and representations at its core, rooted in seeing, real and imagined, center on the marital bed, a site where god, beast, human and all relationships enter a transformative whirl where boundaries and norms dissolve as the identical or double consumes individual identity. [...]Jokasta curses "the infamous double bond" and marital "bed in which she brought forth husband by her husband, children by her own child," a paradigm of doubling's promiscuous magic, the "doubleness at the core of tragedy. The deflection of his eros is tragic in its attempted swerve from the nature and name he inherits from his mother. Since centaurs are "bull piercers" (ken-tauros) this affiliation with the anti-male or aggressive female unbridled horse rather than magical male fiction, this rejection of promiscuous but also marital erotic power returns in his defeat and death by the bull sent by Poseidon.29 In fiction perhaps more than life, naming is destiny, the creation of a persona or mask which charts a mortal's path. [...]the eidellion of 'Venus and Adonis' ends with the castration (gored 'thigh') of Adonis and his transfiguration into beds of anemones "sprinkled with sweet-smelling ambrosia." |
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| ISSN: | 0252-8169 |