Laughing with Medusa Classical Myth and Feminist Thought [Hardcover]

Classical Presences
Series Editors:Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, andJames I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new.ClassicalPresencesbrings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Laughing with Medusaexplores a series of inter-linking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the center of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commissioned work of fiction, Iphigeneia's Wedding, by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

Introduction,Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard
I. Myth and Psychoanalysis
Hope, Promise, Threaten, and Swear: Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future for Boys and Girls,Rachel Bowlby
`Who are we when we read?' Keats, Klein, Cixous, and Elizabeth Cook's Achilles,Vanda Zajko
Beyond Oedipus: Feminist Thought, Psychoanalysis, and Mythical FigulÃS