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"Mythology, Greek, in popular culture"
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The Greek myths that shape the way we think
The Greek myths have been retold countless times, first by the conquering Romans, then through the medieval and Renaissance eras of Europe, and finally finding new expression in masterworks of art, literature and cinema on the global stage. Classical scholar Richard Buxton explores the stories at the heart of this ancient mythology and how they have come to influence our society today. The Greek legends seem to speak to us universally, their deities tantalizingly human - often indulging in behaviours morally ambiguous at best and obscene at worst - and their heroes dealing with dilemmas and destinies that echo, if exaggeratedly, conflicts in our own lives. The dramatic choices that such figures as Prometheus, Medea and Oedipus face have resonated with audiences over thousands of years. Each chapter focuses on a mythical character and the powerful stories and interpretations that surround them. Yet the myths' relevance has not been uniform; they shift with the cultural tide. They have endured moments of censure, criticism, and even ridicule, but now their influence can be recognized almost everywhere, from opera to psychology, from fashion to contemporary art. How is it that these tales have retained their power to connect with our own fascinations, fears and desires, though they came from a world very different from our own? Here Buxton charts their cultural impact through a rich variety of re-imaginings, examining the many guises they have taken through the ages and the profound truths that they continue to illuminate-- Source other than Library of Congress.
Book
Reading, Singing, and Viewing Rape: Uncovering Hidden Messages of Manhood and Womanhood in Popular Culture
The history of rape is traceable to the early days of humankind. Perpetrators inflicted acts of sexual violence against women, girls, and in some cases other males in an effort to assert their dominance over a particular group. Once considered part of the spoils of war, sexual assaults served to punish and control such groups and rationales created to defend these actions. These narratives are entrenched in religious texts, classical antiquity (Greek and Roman mythology), as well as popular culture. For instance, the Bible describes the rape of Tamar by her half-brother, Amnon. After the assault, he became incensed and forcefully threw her out of his bedroom. She found refuge in the home of her brother, Absalom, where she lived the remainder of her days as a fallen woman. Stories like Tamar's appear in mythological narratives from ancient Greece and Rome. One narrative featured in both renderings is that of Philomela, a beautiful, young princess sexually assaulted by her brother-in-law, Tereus, King of Thrace. He then orders her to keep the rape a secret, but she refused to comply. For her insolence, Tereus, cut out her tongue and left her in the woods to die. Philomela survived her injury and sends her husband a tapestry depicting her sexual assault; hence, infuriating Tereus. To escape his wrath, the gods transform her into a nightingale, which placed her beyond his reach. Such stories were orally transmitted from one generation to the next as each endeavored to define or justify the use of violent sexual intercourse to subjugate individuals, specifically women and girls.
Journal Article
Adventures in the Classroom: Creating Traditional Story-Based Role-Playing Games for the High School Curriculum
The goal of this study is to develop a template for turning traditional stories into role-playing games for the high school curriculum. By developing three sample games based on Greek mythology, Arthurian legends, and a widespread folktale type, I explored the process of creating games that fit the limits of secondary classrooms, and can be used to address specific educational standards. The sample games have been tested with groups of high school and college students, and the results of the testing sessions have been evaluated in a narrative case study format. Feedback from the testing sessions has been incorporated in the template. By exploring tabletop role-playing as a form of emergent interactive storytelling, a connection has been created between traditional storytelling and popular culture, with the hope of reaching out to new audiences and introducing stronger interactive elements into storytelling in secondary education.
Journal Article
The Tragicomedy of Celebrity
Celebrity has an age-old appeal. In the Western tradition this appeal and its characteristic motifs can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. Celebrity populates the public stage with a range of larger-than-life actors who play out the human drama—for the edification and the entertainment of the audience. There is comic burlesque and there is tragedy. This article considers the example of the Tiger Woods scandal.
Journal Article
Ancient Women in Modern Media
While the role of women in western society has changed since the time of the great classical eras of Greece and Rome, the heroines of ancient myth remain just as potent to modern audiences as they were for their original creators. Regardless of genre or medium, these women of antiquity retain their power to reinforce, challenge, or outright shatter popular beliefs about the attributes, limitations, and social roles of women. This collection of eight essays examines the legacy of the heroines of antiquity in a variety of contexts, from the page to the stage to the screen, in order to understand why Helen of Troy, the Amazons, and their fellow ladies of myth have remained such vital figures today, and how they have evolved to retain and increase their stature. The contributors to this volume adopt an array of perspectives in order to do justice to the rich legacy of mythic women. These authors hail from three different continents and specialize in multiple disciplines, including Classical Studies, English, and Gender Studies. These diverse approaches make this book applicable to scholars with a wide variety of skills and interests, and ensure the topic a multifaceted treatment in the tradition of the humanities.
eBook
Masks of the Poet, Myths of the People: The Performance of Individuality and Nationhood in Georgian and Russian Modernism
Georgian and Russian modernisms engaged in a conversation that was by no means one-way and in which the chronological development and aesthetic premises of Russian symbolism became curiously inverted. Piecing together this forgotten dialogue allows us to recover a neglected crosscultural and properly Eurasian dimension of the Silver Age. Russians and Georgians alike invoked the mask as a theatrical form and myth as a narrative structure to articulate problems of individual, collective, and national identity. Mask and myth shared two distinct and somewhat incompatible genealogies, the one deriving from the Italian commedia dell'arte and the other from Friedrich Nietzsche's reading of Greek tragedy, both of which corresponded in turn to a typically Russian tension between the “decadent” and “mythopoetic” redactions of symbolism. These genealogies were critically adapted by the Georgians in an attempt to address the perceived needs of Georgian national culture. Aesthetic and philosophical problems concerning the semiotics of the name, the nature of the poetic persona, and the structure of myth came to be related to wider questions proper to an era of crisis and transition: modernity and historical belatedness, the dynamics of cultural importation, the gendered nature of nationhood, and the vexed relationship between popular culture and modernism as an elite cultural formation.
Journal Article
\Of War Machines and Ghetto Scenes\: English-Canadian Nationalism and The Guess Who's \American Woman\
The Canadian cultural & nationalist implications of The Guess Who's song \"American Woman\" (1970) are considered. An overview of The Guess Who's history is presented, emphasizing the band's experience with poverty in the US & other circumstances that prompted the song's composition. Analysis of the song suggests that lead vocalist Burton Cummings's lyrics represented Canadian nationalism's displeasure with growing US militarism & economic & social policies during the 1960s. Although symbolic figures associated with Canada have been traditionally feminized by American & British symbolic figures (eg, Uncle Sam & John Bull, respectively), it is noted that \"American Woman\" transformed Canada into a masculinized victim of an unwanted female American figure. Although many Canadian musicians relocated to the US to achieve greater fortune within its music industry, it is stressed that The Guess Who accelerated the construction of a sense of Canadian identity within music produced by Canadian artists. Additional attention is dedicated to exploring the legacy of anti-Americanism within current Canadian national identities. J. W. Parker
Journal Article
