Freud Essay Medusa

Table of Contents Two dynamic modes of inquiry are helping to make Classical Studies a livelier and more inclusive discipline in this new millennium.Feminist theory proves to be a powerful tool of analysis for Greco-Roman culture, while the Classical Tradition, an umbrella term that includes both the reception of ancient culture and its influence on modern literature and thought, has effaced the boundaries that have fenced off traditional philology from the other humanities.

In a witty, perceptive analysis Sharrock focuses on an extended simile of a mother cow searching for her lost calf as a possible analog for the philosopher.

Yet the atoms, points out Sharrock, the real agents of the poem are (despite their neuter grammatical gender), apparently male, or at least take on masculine roles such as soldiering.

Rachel Bowlby sets the agenda with "The Cronus Complex: Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future for Boys and Girls." Bowlby confronts Freud's reading of Greek myth as a kind of history which facilitated a phallocentric theory of social development.

Although her thesis should by now be self evident, Bowlby makes a competent case: that Freud, himself a product of a patriarchal culture, was influenced by a social construction of gender that is less relevant to modern children.

The following essay by Vanda Zajko ("Who are We When We Read: Keats, Klein, Cixous, and Cook's Achilles") continues to explore the process of "identification" (including the formation of gender identity), with special consideration of how a reader identifies with characters in a fictional text.

At the center of her study is the figure of Achilles, with whom various scholars and writers including Cixous herself have identified.

The idea was facilitated by an impetus to find a colony of Amazons in accordance with Spanish Queen Isabella's wishes; the concept has its genesis, however, in ancient constructions of the Other which situate the feminine and bizarre at the edges of the world.

According to Gregory's elegant analysis the tendency of 18th century American thought to disengage from ancient mythology can be seen as a parallel to feminism's challenge to patriarchal ideology.

In a careful analysis of how the texts of Homer's Iliad and Euripides' Trojan Women deal with Helen's role as the "cause" of the war, this essay generates interesting questions about the fundamental meaning and articulation of causation.

One of the most stimulating points in this paper is a reading of Helen's self-deprecating remarks (e.g.