Del i serien Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Becoming Achilles

Name: Becoming Achilles
SKU: 9780739146910
Price: 959 SEK
Availability: InStock
Author: Richard Kerr Holway
ISBN: 9780739146910

Child-sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the lliad and Beyond

Häftad, Engelska, 2011

AvRichard Kerr Holway

959 kr

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Viewing the Iliad and myth through the lens of modern psychology, in Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond,Richard Holway shows how the epic underwrites individual and communal catharsis and denial. Sacrificial childrearing generates but also threatens agonistic, glory-seeking ancient Greek cultures. Not only aggression but knowledge of sacrificial parenting must be purged.Just as Zeus contrives to have threats to his regime play out harmlessly (to him) in the mortal realm, so the Iliad dramatizes threats to Archaic and later Greek cultures in the safe arena of poetic performance. The epic represents in displaced form destructive mother-son and father-daughter liaisons and resulting strife within and between generations.Holway calls into question the Iliad’s (and many scholars’) presentation of Achilles as a hero who speaks truth to power, learns through suffering, and exemplifies kingly virtues that Agamemnon lacks. So too the Iliad’s cathartic process, whether conceived as purging innate aggression or arriving at moral clarity. Instead, Holway argues, Achilles (and Socrates) try to prove they are not what at bottom they experience themselves to be—needy, defenseless children, who fear to acknowledge, much less speak out against, parents' use of them to meet parents' needs.What emerges from Holway’s analysis is not only a new reading of the Iliad, from its first word to its last, but a revised account of the family dynamics underlying ancient Greek cultures.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2011-11-17
Mått154 x 231 x 19 mm
Vikt408 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieGreek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Antal sidor270
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9780739146910

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Holway's evaluation of the Iliad in light of attachment theory and Freudian interpretations of family dynamics represents a valuable contribution to a series of interdisciplinary Greek studies edited by Gregory Nagy. Holway (Univ. of Virginia) posits that Achilles' glory-seeking temperament developed because his mother attempted to use him to retaliate against Zeus for rejecting her, providing illuminating insight into the psychological underpinnings of Greek hero-mythology and Greek culture more broadly. Greek hero literature is literally built on such examples of 'parents sacrificing children's needs to their own.' Dysfunctional families abound in the Homeric tradition, and the deleterious effects on people and institutions match up well with the family psychology literature. Holway pursues these connections to explain heroic violence and glory-seeking (chapter 2), patterns of patriarchy and misogyny (chapters 5 and 6), and even Socrates' actions during and after his trial (epilogue). While the analysis relies heavily on a portion of contemporary psychology to explain much about ancient Greek society, the book is an excellent resource for numerous fields of study. Summing Up: Highly recommended.