Abstract
This paper examines the intersection of end myth and violence in the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare, and in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. The review is grounded, in part, in Freud’s late work Civilization and its Discontents, where the human inclination to aggression is seen as an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition, one that constitutes, for Freud, the greatest impediment to civilization. Thus, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure for Freud: “The fateful question for the human species”, Freud writes, is “whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Milton similarly explore and fundamentally rework the intersecting of memorial rituals with a violent code, leaving us with a mournful vision that adheres not to a traditional system of values that would build upon communal norms and the continuities of social and religious forms–these testaments to past suffering and the potentiality for the continuance of suffering–but rather to an interrogation of such systems, a plea for the construction of a more ethical and humane futurity.
Presenters
Dr. Mark KelleyAssociate Professor of Humanities, English, American Public University, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Literary Criticism, Conceptual Frameworks, Identity and Difference
