Divine and Human Action in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (original) (raw)

Re-reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Plays

Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies

Sophocles’s Oedipus plays depict failed integration of self-knowledge as worthy of divinization. Acting out vengeance is the evidence of Oedipus’s failed integration. Oedipus’s task of integration pivots on grasping in what sense he can be understood as guilty. His plight demonstrates that ignorance is part of unconsciousness and, contrary to Jung’s attitude toward ignorance, requires some kind of coping with responsibility. Vengeance was a conscious value among the ancient Greeks. In Sophocles’s last play, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus acts out vengeance against his sons, and Sophocles divinizes this acting out through having Oedipus join the goddesses, the Furies. This divinization suggests that vengeance is archetypal, depending on culture only for images of manifestation. I argue that Oedipus’s acting out of vengeance can be read as symptomatic of a cultural complex. I identify the situation leading to his acting out as his failure to imagine how creatively to take responsibility ...

Othello as a Tragedy of Interpretive Models

This article argues that Othello dramatizes the struggle between two characters to control the interpretive possibilities of their world. These two characters are Othello and Iago. They both try to bring the inherent polysemy of the play under their control. This enables them to control the destiny of the other characters and their actions. The play cannot have two dominant interpreters. This is why the general and his ancient can only vie for supremacy. Each of them is ready to destroy anyone — including himself — to win over the other. To explain their strategies, I will make use of certain terms invented by the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. Eco’s semiotic categories will help us highlight the way in which Iago and Othello direct the processes whereby the different elements of drama are imbued with signification.

The End of Sophocles' *Oedipus Tyrannus*: the sceptical case reconsidered

An earlier article of mine, Kovacs (2009a), discussed OT 1424-1530, whose genuineness was impugned most recently by Dawe (2001 and 2006). I argued that 1424-67 (which I call A) are genuine, but that 1468-1530 (which I call B) are spurious. Sommerstein (2011), accepting my defence of A, undertook the defence of all but a few lines of B as well, dismantling much of my case against it and adding the argument that the transmitted ending mirrors the play’s beginning and is therefore presumptively Sophoclean. The present article, in part a reply to Sommerstein’s reply, restates some of my earlier arguments and also presents new evidence for the spuriousness of B.