Books by Vered Lev Kenaan
Dappim Research in Literature, 2021
The introductory essay discusses mythical, poetical and cultural contexts for interpreting the CO... more The introductory essay discusses mythical, poetical and cultural contexts for interpreting the COVID-19 mask. It deals with the biblical and ancient Greek origins of the mask, tying the ritual object to its presence in Modern Hebrew literature. The essay questions the political significance of the COVID mask for reshaping our identity as a civic community.
Dappim Research in Literature , 2021
The volume's articles discussing mythical, poetical and cultural contexts for interpreting the CO... more The volume's articles discussing mythical, poetical and cultural contexts for interpreting the COVID-19 mask. The Introductory essay deals with the biblical and ancient Greek origins of the mask, tying the ritual object to its presence in Modern Hebrew literature. The essay questions the political significance of the COVID mask for reshaping our identity as a civic community.
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2021
John Gale's Review on The Ancient Unconscious
History and Psychoanalysis, 2020
Review of The Ancient Unconscious
The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text
A New Book from Oxford University Press
A Book Announcement plus Discount
This book makes an important contribution to three approaches to classics: feminism, myth critici... more This book makes an important contribution to three approaches to classics: feminism, myth criticism, and textual theory. Lev Kenaan creatively explores the way female subjectivity is embedded in masculine texts." -Margaret M. Toscano, The Classical Review
Papers by Vered Lev Kenaan
The triangulation of classics, psychoanalysis, and comparative literature is the proper context f... more The triangulation of classics, psychoanalysis, and comparative literature is the proper context for discussing the exegetical significance of what Erich Auerbach, the father of comparative literature, turned into a conceptual cornerstone: the figura futurorum. Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex through the lens of Auerbach’s figura futurorum, the chapter explains the fruitfulness of analogy for psychoanalysis and comparative literature and the kinds of linking (Oedipus–Hamlet, savage–neurotic) that have been crucial in the making of Oedipus’ future into the central plot of psychoanalysis. The universalism of Freud’s claims for psychoanalysis are examined, and shown to depend on his relation to classical antiquity in the formulation of his own experience.
Ancient narrative, May 31, 2011
American Imago, 2021
Feminist and postcolonial studies have often criticized Freudian psychoanalysis for staging the a... more Feminist and postcolonial studies have often criticized Freudian psychoanalysis for staging the analysis of the hysterical, female patient through the metaphor of conquering terra incognita. Freud, in these perspectives, undermines the credibility of her speech by characterizing it as “enigmatic, ungrammatical, disjointed, fragmented and polylingual.” Freud also has been often criticized for employing scientific positivism, whose underlying assumption is that the analyst knows better than the woman/analysand. In recent years, however, the return to Freud has engaged new feminist and postcolonial readings which interpret his text against its historical constraints. Thus, Freud’s Eurocentric worldview appears to be more fragile and less homogeneous as we revisit it today. Moreover, the feminine figure of terra incognita triggers defensive (hysterical) responses from its various explorers: the psychoanalyst, the archeologist and the philologist. This essay offers a reading of Freud’s metaphor of archeology. It uncovers symptoms of fragility and ambivalence underlying the scientific efforts to preserve the distinction between the objective analyst and the hysterical patient, as well as the distinction between modernity and antiquity so central to the disciplines of archeology and philology.
This chapter deals with the Oedipal dream as a common experience for both ancient and modern drea... more This chapter deals with the Oedipal dream as a common experience for both ancient and modern dreamers. This sense of commonality cannot erase a deep and ineradicable difference separating the ancients from the moderns. And yet the chapter points to a hermeneutic possibility that only a comparative reading of ancient and modern dreams can offer. By juxtaposing ancient and modern texts, and ancient and modern dream-interpretations, a third space of textuality—an intermediate zone—opens for us. This is where the unconscious will show up. Relationships between mothers and sons are taken to be the focus for the problematics of the literal-symbolic meaning of the erotic.
Chapter 2 presents the question of the unconscious in the context of the history of nineteenth-ce... more Chapter 2 presents the question of the unconscious in the context of the history of nineteenth-century German reflection on the encounter between moderns and ancients. The Hegelian dialectic of negation and preservation serves to unpack the received, modified memory of antiquity. In contrast to the common nineteenth-century view that regards classical antiquity as humanity’s remote childhood—its primordial past—Hegel’s notion of antiquity emphasizes rather its connectedness to present circumstances. For Hegel, the memory of antiquity is part of the present and therefore has a formative influence on the openness of modern consciousness to its future.
Codex, Jun 30, 2019
A analogia entre Édipo e Odisseu é impressionante e apresenta um caso interessante de intertextua... more A analogia entre Édipo e Odisseu é impressionante e apresenta um caso interessante de intertextualidade, uma vez que sua relação é investigada a partir dos liames entre o enredo do Édipo Rei de Sófocles e o episódio da lavagem dos pés de Odisseu, no Canto XIX. Defendo que o Odisseu homérico forneceu a Sófocles um modelo inspirador para imitação: um homem de meia-idade carrega no seu corpo uma marca de infância da qual se manteve alheio por muitos anos. Após vários anos ausente, o retorno ao lar traz consigo o retorno da memória: a traumática escarificação vem à tona. As cicatrizes de Édipo e Odisseu trazem de volta algo que caíra no esquecimento. Voltando à "Cicatriz de Odisseu" de Auerbach, este artigo aborda a cicatriz 5 como uma junção do esquecimento e da recordação, e mostra como a memória Odisseu e o esquecimento de Édipo estão entrelaçados.
Ancient narrative, Aug 28, 2015
Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel is a collection of articles that, as the title suggests,... more Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel is a collection of articles that, as the title suggests, focuses on the ancient novel's written form as a key to understanding it as a literary genre. The editors call attention to the centrality the ancient novel grants to both historical and fictional images of "readers" and "writers." The title of the present collection of essays suggests a dramatic move away from an earlier notion of the novel's popular readership. The methodological shift that took place in the mid-1980s has radically changed studies of the ancient novel. Scholars have gradually abandoned the focus on folkloric and popular concerns and invested much more interest in the sophistic context, and have turned, as a result, more to questions of readership and reception. In 1994 two seminal articles on the ancient novel's readership appeared in James Tatum's The Search for the Ancient Novel, in which the exploration of the genre was still described as a contribution to "the newest chapter in ancient literature." Both Susan A. Stephens' "Who Read Ancient Novels?" and Ewen Bowie's "The readership of Greek Novels in the Ancient World" responded critically to modern discussions of the ancient novels, challenging the idea that the ancient novel was a low and popular type of literature intended for a broad and uncultivated audience. More specifically, both Stephens and Bowie argued against the association of the ancient novel with inexperienced readers, and with women in particular (as Brigitte Egger, for example, has argued in her influential work), or more generally with "people who had not yet moved definitely from orality to literacy" (as Tomas Hägg, among others, affirms in "Orality, Literacy, and the 'Readership' of the Early Greek Novel"). 1 As for the hypotheses that literary incompetence required reading aloud, mime performances that transmit the novel's main plot lines, or possibly even the use of illustrated texts, the general consensus today is that the novel's highly textual
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Books by Vered Lev Kenaan
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