Muzica, Evghenii (2006) 'A place where three roads meet': Sophocles's Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet after Freud. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The dissertation presents a detailed investigation of Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet in the context of Freud's comparison of the plays, sketched out in a number of his early writings (most notably The Interpretation of Dreams) but never pursued at length either by him or by any later critics. The interest of the current investigation is not inspired simply by the absence of such a detailed comparison, on the one hand, and by its constant implication in the modem analysis of the plays in question, on the other. The particular inspiration for the current project is the work of Jean Laplanche that in the last forty years has been dedicated to a fundamental reconceptualisation of Freud's theory of the human subject by way of return to the questions of the seduction and otherness. Equally inspiring for the current project have been the recent developments in the non-psychoanalytic analyses of tragedy (ancient Greek, Elizabethan, and as genre as such) that consistently aspire to cross the boundaries of the traditional textual-historicist approach to the literary text in order to accommodate the particularly heterogeneous nature of their object of study. Thus, the current project provides a comprehensive analysis of Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet, successively, at the intersection of psychoanalytic and other (philological and philosophical) approaches to tragedy, paying attention not only to the texts of the tragedies themselves but to the narrative-mythological, dramatic, and, in the case of Sophocles, translational tradition to which they pertain. The relevance of Freudian categories to the texts and genre in question is thus thoroughly examined. As a result, the conclusion is reached that it is specifically through Laplanchean reconceptualisation of Freud's notion of seduction (and the related notions of the enigmatic message, the other, translation and transference) that a psychoanalytic approach becomes more amenable to the needs of literary analysis. The application of Laplanchean categories to the analysis of these tragedies helps to elucidate the role of the father with new precision (in comparison with the previous mother-centred approaches to these tragedies). In its main body, the dissertation consists of a general Introduction, analytical sections on Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet, Conclusion, and the list of the consulted works.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PA Classical philology P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Sophocles. Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet, Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939, Laplanche, Jean, Tragedy -- Psychological aspects, Seduction in literature, Drama -- History and criticism
Date:	October 2006
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Fletcher, John, 1937-
Sponsors:	University of Warwick (UoW)
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	300 leaves
Language:	eng
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1178

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