This post was written for MythMatters in August 2015 and modestly corrected here. Miklós Jancsó adapted the stageplay by L. Gyurkó, Szerelmem, Elektra, into the 1974 film Electra, My Love. The film is very watchable as cinema … for some viewers (to judge by the Amazon.com reviews!). …
Mrs. Orpheus: Duffy’s “Eurydice”
Carol Ann Duffy’s (b. 1955) “Eurydice” appears as the twenty-fourth poem in her collection The World’s Wife, sidled between “Salome” and “the Kray Sisters”. Like her sisters in the collection, Duffy’s Eurydice vocalizes a silenced woman from literature and myth. Duffy’s witty feminist …
THE Athens of the South
The big question, the deep thought behind this post is this: What does it mean when a place like Nashville, TN claims to be “THE Athens of the South”? Granted, I have added the emphatic CAPS. Yet, this was the claim in the age of …
Ada reads Baucis and Philemon into C. Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997)
The protagonist of Cold Mountain, Ada, reads to Ruby’s kids and to her own nine-year old daughter the story of Baucis and Philemon, a myth of gained paradise. Without any overt acknowledgement of this myth’s approach within the novel, Frazier uses the myth’s telling as …
Willy Claflin and “Pegamoose”
Willy Claflin’s “Pegamoose and the Gorgonzola Medusa” is a mythological adaptation of the classical myth of Perseus and Medusa, a kind of doggerel pastiche passing familiar details but veering into a novel account of a heroic moose. Whether or not the result is comic brilliance …