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Author: Wendy Doniger Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226156443 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 631
Book Description
"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger. The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. At the bottom of these wonderful stories, ancient myths, and historical anecdotes lie the dynamics of sex and gender, power and identity. Why can't people tell the difference in the dark? Can love always tell the difference between one lover and another? And what kind of truth does sex tell? Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.
Author: Wendy Doniger Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226156443 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 631
Book Description
"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger. The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. At the bottom of these wonderful stories, ancient myths, and historical anecdotes lie the dynamics of sex and gender, power and identity. Why can't people tell the difference in the dark? Can love always tell the difference between one lover and another? And what kind of truth does sex tell? Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.
Author: Sandra Ladick Collins Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443845868 Category : Bibles Languages : en Pages : 230
Book Description
The biblical stories of Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, share much in common – singular women who are left to rely upon their own wits to achieve some measure of victory over the men around them. Scholarly interpretation of these women often reduces them to mere stock characters who inform civic notions about Israel, the perennial underdog who, like these women, achieves against great odds. Or, they reflect the trickery and moral ambiguity inherent in their line as ancestresses of the House of David. However, when read for their gender information (and not for what they can tell readers about Israel), one finds women who employ strategies of deception and trickery, motivated by individual self-interest, in order to successfully maneuver within the system to their benefit. Such initiative can be seen as valorous: they save themselves through their own pluck and ingenuity. Thus, a close consideration of these stories finds that heroic biblical women carry their essential weapons upon and within themselves in their drive, their resolve and their cleverness. Using methods from biblical study as well as folklore, this study identifies biblical women motivated by self-interest coupled with deception and an incidence of the “bedtrick,” an instance of sexual trickery that challenges the text’s power and gender dynamics. This identification puts Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, in league with female heroes from folk tale and legend. By contrasting and comparing common motifs and actions with traits established by other non-biblical female heroic narratives, strong heroic themes are located in all four narratives. This offers a dynamic argument for identifying the female biblical heroic. This work concludes that this new identification of heroic women in the Bible profoundly affects further interpretation of the Bible.
Author: Verna A. Foster Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351885340 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
Focusing on European tragicomedy from the early modern period to the theatre of the absurd, Verna Foster here argues for the independence of tragicomedy as a genre that perceives and communicates human experience differently from the various forms of tragedy, comedy, and the drame (serious drama that is neither comic nor tragic). Foster posits that, in the sense of the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable new genre, tragicomedy has emerged only twice in the history of drama. She argues that tragicomedy first emerged and was controversial in the Renaissance; and that it has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic genres. In the first section of the book, the author analyzes the name 'tragicomedy' and the genre's problems of identity; then goes on to explore early modern tragicomedies by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. A transitional chapter addresses cognate genres. The final section of the book focuses on modern tragicomedies by Ibsen, Chekhov, Synge, O'Casey, Williams, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. By exploring dramaturgical similarities between early modern and modern tragicomedies, Foster demonstrates the persistence of tragicomedy's generic markers and provides a more precise conceptual framework for the genre than has so far been available.
Author: Jonathan A. Silk Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824864174 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
Riven by Lust explores the tale of a man accused of causing the fundamental schism in early Indian Buddhism, but not before he has sex with his mother and kills his father. In tracing this Indian Buddhist Oedipal tale, Jonathan Silk follows it through texts in all of the major canonical languages of Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese, along the way noting parallels and contrasts with classical and medieval European stories such as the legend of the Oedipal Judas. Simultaneously, he investigates the psychological and anthropological understandings of the tale of mother-son incest in light of contemporary psychological and anthropological understandings of incest, with special attention to the question of why we consider it among the worst of crimes. In seeking to understand how the story worked in Indian texts and for Indian audiences—as well as how it might work for modern readers—this book has both horizontal and vertical dimensions, probing the place of the Oedipal in Indian culture, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and simultaneously framing the Indian Oedipal within broader human concerns, thereby contributing to the study of the history of Buddhism, the transmission of narratives in the ancient world, and the fundamental nature of one aspect of human sexuality. Starting from a brief reference in a polemical treatise, Riven by Lust demonstrates that its authors borrowed and intentionally adapted a preexisting story of an Oedipal antihero. This recasting allowed them to calumniate their opponents in the strongest possible terms through the rhetoric of murder and incest. Silk draws on a wide variety of sources to demonstrate the range of thinking about incest in Indian Buddhist culture, thereby uncovering the strategies and working methods of the ancient polemicists. He argues that Indian Buddhists and Hindus, while occupying the same world for the most part, thought differently about fundamental issues such as incest, and hints at the consequent necessity of a reappraisal of our notions of the shape of the ancient cultural sphere they shared. Provocative and innovative, Riven by Lust is a paradigmatic analysis of a major theme of world mythology and a signal contribution to the study of the history of incest and comparative sexualities. It will attract readers interested in Buddhism, Indian studies, Asian studies, comparative culture, mythology, psychology, and the history of sexuality.
Author: Jane Garry Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 135157616X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 552
Book Description
This is an authoritative presentation and discussion of the most basic thematic elements universally found in folklore and literature. The reference provides a detailed analysis of the most common archetypes or motifs found in the folklore of selected communities around the world. Each entry is written by a noted authority in the field, and includes accompanying reference citations. Entries are keyed to the Motif-Index of Folk Literature by Stith Thompson and grouped according to that Index's scheme. The reference also includes an introductory essay on the concepts of archetypes and motifs and the scholarship associated with them. This is the only book in English on motifs and themes that is completely folklore oriented, deals with motif numbers, and is tied to the Thompson Motif-Index. It includes in-depth examination of such motifs as: Bewitching; Chance and Fate; Choice of Roads; Death or Departure of the Gods; the Double; Ghosts and Other Revenants; the Hero Cycle; Journey to the Otherworld; Magic Invulnerability; Soothsayer; Transformation; Tricksters.
Author: Joanne Finkelstein Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857710605 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanour, 'personality' and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of 'persona'. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility. Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this 'self', in the enduring appeal of the 'new you' and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors.
Author: Marliss C. Desens Publisher: University of Delaware Press ISBN: 9780874134766 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
None of these assumptions has been tested against the evidence of the surviving plays from the period - an oversight that the present study seeks to remedy.
Author: Howard Marchitello Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137463619 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 571
Book Description
This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.
Author: Wendy Doniger
Author: Wendy Doniger
Author: Sandra Ladick Collins
Author: Verna A. Foster
Author: Jonathan A. Silk
Author: Jane Garry
Author: Joanne Finkelstein
Author: Marliss C. Desens
Author: Carol Thomas Neely
Author: Virginia Mason Vaughan
Author: Howard Marchitello