Comparative Literature

Trisha Brady (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY)

This proposed panel invites submissions for papers that will discuss the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and Greek Tragedy. This panel will create an opportunity for psychoanalytic theorists and scholars of ancient Greek texts to present current scholarship and generate a discussion that addresses the following questions. To what extent have psychoanalytic theorists engaged Greek tragedy to elucidate psychoanalytic concepts and principles, and to what end? How does this psychoanalytic tome of scholarship inform our critical and pedagogical approaches to the Greek tragedies? What tensions arise between psychoanalysis’s appropriation of the tragic genre—its plots, characters, conventions, and theories—and the Greek dramatists’ views of the world? Panelists might consider Freud’s use of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Lacan’s discussion of Sophocles's Antigone, or other psychoanalytic criticism generated by scholars engaging works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides .

To what extent have psychoanalytic theorists engaged Greek tragedy to elucidate psychoanalytic concepts and principles, and to what end? How does this psychoanalytic tome of scholarship inform our critical and pedagogical approaches to the Greek tragedies? What tensions arise between psychoanalysis’s appropriation of the tragic genre—its plots, characters, conventions, and theories—and the Greek dramatists’ views of the world? Panelists might consider Freud’s use of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Lacan’s discussion of Sophocles's Antigone, or other psychoanalytic theory or literary criticism generated by scholars engaging works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Please submit 500 word abstracts.