an entry for purposes of boosting morale (mine)

[truepenny]

Have finished reading Shakespeare's Ghost Writers.

After lunch, will incorporate into Hamlet chapter and try very very hard not to get derailed by the idiocies of Freudianism. Also will try to limit my disparaging comments on people who don't do their genre/theater history homework, especially when a little homework would have saved them from promulgating a quite lovely but also factually inaccurate theory.

Revenge tragedy was not a dead genre in 1601.

*harrumph*

Must now go find food.

Comments

Is--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Revenge tragedy *ever* a dead genre?

Re: Is--

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, actually, it just sinks lower and lower on the cultural totem pole (although it was fairly declasse in Shakespeare's day, too, and only "rehabilitated" by the Bardolatry of the eighteenth century and boy howdy did they have some trouble with THAT project), so that now it inhabits horror movies. See the last chapter of my dissertation, once I've written in.

If that was a rhetorical question, I apologize. I'm in full-frontal academic at the moment, and there ARE no rhetorical questions. In a moment I shall charge up San Juan Hill like Teddy in Arsenic and Old Lace.

Re: Is--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

I get my best rants on from rhetorical questions. Dare I ask what you are an academic of?

Re: Is--

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm getting my Ph.D. in English Literature, specializing in the Renaissance (which in my department is defined as 1500-1660, with a special exemption for Milton). My particular area of concentration is drama, and I'm writing my dissertation on ghosts in Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy.

And that's the short answer. *g*

Re: Is--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hah! In about six months I may be able to converse knowledgably with you on that! I'm researching a sort of Elizabethan alternate history thing entitled The Stratford Man as we speak.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Strangely, I often find myself cheerleading for Freud. There's no doubt that for decades he got *way* too much attention, and there's also no doubt that a good half of his theories about "universal" human nature derive from the peculiarities of his own life and his own place and time. But the other half encompasses some pretty brilliant stuff. So if you're ever in the mood to argue about Freud, do let me know.

Re: Is--

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Cool.

Feel free to ask questions. I do not in any way, shape, or form promise to have answers, but I'll probably have opinions and possibly strident ones. *g*

Also, I am inspired to recommend one of my new favorite stories (if you haven't read it already), "Amy, at the Bottom of the Stairs" by John M. Ford (Asimov's, Apr. '82, reprinted From the End of the Twentieth Century). I would say it's my favorite story about Amy Robsart, but to the best of my knowledge it's the only story about Amy Robsart. V. v. cool.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't actually universally hate Freud. I just hate the way he decides "the male psyche" is synonymous with "the human psyche," and that what women want most in the world is to be men. Because, hello? I don't. I nearly had a fit laughing at the bit in whichever Neveryon book it is where Delany carefully and lovingly sends up Freudianism. It's beautiful.

But his ideas about the way repression work, and some of the stuff he says about dreams, and especially what he says about the uncanny (skirting politely around the Oedipal bits)--that part of his intellectual work is brilliant.

[pameladean]

Some of my happiest moments in graduate school came in researching and writing a paper called "Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Tennyson's 'The Holy Grail,' with Disparaging Commentary." At that time (1977) most available such criticism was heavily Freudian, and I took the most exquisite pleasure in disassembling it. Talk about people who don't understand fantasy.

(I have since come to despair of Tennyson; but even so, he doesn't deserve Freudian criticism of the kind he got.)

Pamela