Viva Modern Critical Interpretations Oedipus Rex

First presented between 429 and 425 B.C., Oedipus Rex is the most well known extant tragedy by the fifth century Greek dramatist Sophocles. The sheer volume of performances and reinterpretations of the work in the intervening centuries speaks to its enduring power. Sophocles’ Oedipus was itself a new version of an older myth, the story of an abandoned child who unwittingly fulfills a prophecy that he will murder his father and marry his mother. In this tragic episode, Sigmund Freud found a manifestation of the human urges he called the Oedipus Complex, a psychoanalytic reading of Sophocles’ play that literary critics have spent the last century combating. This collection of essays draws upon a rich history of criticism and commentary on Oedipus Rex to examine the questions of fate, free will, heroism, and humanity that the tragedy continues to provoke. To me personally Oedipus is a kind of symbol of the human intelligence which cannot rest until it has solved all the riddles—even the last riddle, to which the answer is that human happiness is built on an illusion. — E. R. Dodds Oedipus did have one freedom he was free to find out or not find out the truth. This was the element of Sophoclean sleight-of-hand that enabled him to make a drama out of the situation which the philosophers used as the classic demonstration of man’s subjection to fate. But it is more than a solution to an apparently insoluble dramatic problem; it is the key to the play’s tragic theme and the protagonist’s heroic stature. — Bernard Knox VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor’s note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the author’s life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.