Metka Zupancic
Professor Emerita of French/Modern Languages, from the University of Alabama, currently residing in Slovenia. Research interests include French and Francophone contemporary literature, mostly by women writers (f. ex. Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Chantal Chawaf, Jeanne Hyvrard, Louise Dupré, Francine D'Amour, France Théoret, Marie-Sissi Labrèeche, Andrée Christensen, Maïssa Bey, Assia Djebar, Ananda Devi, etc.), Indian (diaspora) literature by women writers (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, etc.), myth criticism and myth analysis
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Books by Metka Zupancic
Within an innovative and interdisciplinary framework including ethics, myth criticism, sociocriticism, psychoanalysis and gender theories, mythical figures, feminine and others that reveal the ways we perceive the world, are being analyzed in light of the various aspects pertaining to their transformations through the literature, cinema and historical events of this past century. The contributors of the thirteen essays that comprise the present volume, originating from ten countries and four continents, elaborate the manner in which Greek, Biblical and African myths, occasionally generating new myths borne out of contemporary conflicts or traumas – unveil the belief systems that define human relationships, in particular the perception of the body, still subject to a collective imaginary conditioned by the patriarchal supremacy.
ABSTRACT:
Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017): The disturbing power of syncretic mythical paradigms
Metka Zupančič, Professor Emerita, University of Alabama
Darren Aronofsky, Mother! (2017): An almost impotent Poet/Orpheus who cannot be content with domestic happiness and needs drama to become productive, willfully ignoring the destructiveness of his behavior. A diaphanous young woman akin to Hestia, dedicating her life to (earthly) creations (rebuilding a house, a hearth, a universe) and to motherhood, both in caring for her egomaniac husband and in giving birth to their child. A massive disruption in the self-contained system, with the intrusion of bigger and bigger crowds that make the Poet into a godly figure, with a Christ-like obsessive cult attached to him, which will lead to an apocalyptic collapse of this universe. A cannibalistic sparagmos of the newborn baby, this omophagy combined with a certain Eucharist (all the while the Poet remains intact, “delegating” his most beloved to be sacrificed in his stead). The young woman’s demise in self-immolation; with the final gift, to her husband, of her crystalized heart, from which a new cycle of existence might be born, as in the tradition of Dionysus Zagreus… An overwhelming abundance of mythical schemes—paradigms in which one could see an allegory, a controversial modern parable, extremely hard to decode and interpret, because of director’s deliberate choice to create a disturbing and overwhelming cinematographic experience for his audiences. In this completely SYNCRETIC MYTHICAL ENVIRONMENT, the main question is to establish the esthetic, emotional, intellectual and spiritual FUNCTION of the mythical paradigms such as integrated in this film. How do we recognize the mythical schemes, how do we perceive their overlapping and their interactions? In this particular audio-visual setting, and more generally in all audio-visual productions, how do mythical schemes combine into NEW MYTHICAL NARRATIVES? How do they AFFECT the audiences? In other words, what is the difference in their IMPACT, in comparison with a written text that we need to reactivate through our imagination? Clearly, on a large screen, these elements hit us with their IMMEDIACY and might thus be much more powerful—under the condition that they are indeed destined to carry “mythical” dimensions—when they manage to escape the expected, the easily anticipated, which is definitely the case with this Aronofsky’s film.
The revised essay published in Myth and Audiovisual Creation, José Manuel Losada & Antonella Lipscomb (eds.), Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2019 (103-114).
In L’épreuve du labyrinthe (2006 [1978]), Claude-Henri Rocquet leads a series of insightful discussions with Mircea Eliade. The philosopher insists on the need to demystify the demystification, in order to uncover the sacred in the profane and unveil “the camouflage of sacredness in desacralized world” (159).
From the standpoint of myth criticism, this is the central concern in Julia Kristeva’s novel Samouraï (1990; trans. 1992 by Barbara Bray as The Samurai). The much respected semiotician, philosopher and psychoanalyst, with her almost deified status in North American feminist circles, paradoxically explores contemporary values in light of their dismantlement and various forms of desacralization. In The Samurai, the first of her four novels, through intertextual references and with a title that refers to mythical figures in the Far East, Kristeva examines and critiques the transformation of traditional (mythical and also ethical) principles, in French intellectual milieu mainly of the sixties. With a parade of easily recognizable “types” in which (anti-)heroic behaviours underscore the apparent disconnect from the “sacred,” the novel’s ironic tone focuses on the efforts of numerous characters to attain a clearer understanding of life, at a very critical time in human history, particularly in the West.
Papers by Metka Zupancic
vzorcev, preoblikovanju starih načinov izražanja in tudi obnašanja.
Within an innovative and interdisciplinary framework including ethics, myth criticism, sociocriticism, psychoanalysis and gender theories, mythical figures, feminine and others that reveal the ways we perceive the world, are being analyzed in light of the various aspects pertaining to their transformations through the literature, cinema and historical events of this past century. The contributors of the thirteen essays that comprise the present volume, originating from ten countries and four continents, elaborate the manner in which Greek, Biblical and African myths, occasionally generating new myths borne out of contemporary conflicts or traumas – unveil the belief systems that define human relationships, in particular the perception of the body, still subject to a collective imaginary conditioned by the patriarchal supremacy.
ABSTRACT:
Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017): The disturbing power of syncretic mythical paradigms
Metka Zupančič, Professor Emerita, University of Alabama
Darren Aronofsky, Mother! (2017): An almost impotent Poet/Orpheus who cannot be content with domestic happiness and needs drama to become productive, willfully ignoring the destructiveness of his behavior. A diaphanous young woman akin to Hestia, dedicating her life to (earthly) creations (rebuilding a house, a hearth, a universe) and to motherhood, both in caring for her egomaniac husband and in giving birth to their child. A massive disruption in the self-contained system, with the intrusion of bigger and bigger crowds that make the Poet into a godly figure, with a Christ-like obsessive cult attached to him, which will lead to an apocalyptic collapse of this universe. A cannibalistic sparagmos of the newborn baby, this omophagy combined with a certain Eucharist (all the while the Poet remains intact, “delegating” his most beloved to be sacrificed in his stead). The young woman’s demise in self-immolation; with the final gift, to her husband, of her crystalized heart, from which a new cycle of existence might be born, as in the tradition of Dionysus Zagreus… An overwhelming abundance of mythical schemes—paradigms in which one could see an allegory, a controversial modern parable, extremely hard to decode and interpret, because of director’s deliberate choice to create a disturbing and overwhelming cinematographic experience for his audiences. In this completely SYNCRETIC MYTHICAL ENVIRONMENT, the main question is to establish the esthetic, emotional, intellectual and spiritual FUNCTION of the mythical paradigms such as integrated in this film. How do we recognize the mythical schemes, how do we perceive their overlapping and their interactions? In this particular audio-visual setting, and more generally in all audio-visual productions, how do mythical schemes combine into NEW MYTHICAL NARRATIVES? How do they AFFECT the audiences? In other words, what is the difference in their IMPACT, in comparison with a written text that we need to reactivate through our imagination? Clearly, on a large screen, these elements hit us with their IMMEDIACY and might thus be much more powerful—under the condition that they are indeed destined to carry “mythical” dimensions—when they manage to escape the expected, the easily anticipated, which is definitely the case with this Aronofsky’s film.
The revised essay published in Myth and Audiovisual Creation, José Manuel Losada & Antonella Lipscomb (eds.), Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2019 (103-114).
In L’épreuve du labyrinthe (2006 [1978]), Claude-Henri Rocquet leads a series of insightful discussions with Mircea Eliade. The philosopher insists on the need to demystify the demystification, in order to uncover the sacred in the profane and unveil “the camouflage of sacredness in desacralized world” (159).
From the standpoint of myth criticism, this is the central concern in Julia Kristeva’s novel Samouraï (1990; trans. 1992 by Barbara Bray as The Samurai). The much respected semiotician, philosopher and psychoanalyst, with her almost deified status in North American feminist circles, paradoxically explores contemporary values in light of their dismantlement and various forms of desacralization. In The Samurai, the first of her four novels, through intertextual references and with a title that refers to mythical figures in the Far East, Kristeva examines and critiques the transformation of traditional (mythical and also ethical) principles, in French intellectual milieu mainly of the sixties. With a parade of easily recognizable “types” in which (anti-)heroic behaviours underscore the apparent disconnect from the “sacred,” the novel’s ironic tone focuses on the efforts of numerous characters to attain a clearer understanding of life, at a very critical time in human history, particularly in the West.
vzorcev, preoblikovanju starih načinov izražanja in tudi obnašanja.