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Sexual Ambivalence
Luc Brisson
其他書名
Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
出版
University of California Press
, 2002-03-28
主題
Fiction / Classics
History / Ancient / General
History / Ancient / Greece
History / Ancient / Rome
History / Europe / Greece
Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical
Psychology / Human Sexuality
Social Science / Gender Studies
ISBN
0520223918
9780520223912
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=27-JHbZZqOQC&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
This fascinating book collects and translates most of the extant written Graeco-Roman material on human beings, divinities, animals, and other creatures who were said to have been both female and male. Luc Brisson provides a commentary that situates this rich source material within its historical and intellectual contexts. These selections--from mythological, philosophical, historical, and anecdotal sources--describe cases of either simultaneous dual sexuality, as in androgyny and in hermaphroditism, or successive dual sexuality, as in the case of Tiresias (the blind Theban prophet), which are found through the whole span of Graeco-Roman antiquity.
Sexual Ambivalence
is an invaluable sourcebook that gathers this suggestive, yet hard to find, material in one convenient place.
This book presents some very obscure but wonderfully strange material. There is the ghost story about a father who returns from the dead to devour his dual-sexed son in the public square, leaving behind only the head, which proceeds to deliver a prophecy from its position on the ground. In addition to including such familiar sources as the myths of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as told in Ovid's
Metamorphoses
and Aristophanes' myth of the origins of the sexes and sexuality in Plato's
Symposium,
Brisson also discusses cosmogonic mythology in Hesiodic poetry, the Orphic
Rhapsodies,
Gnosticism, the
Hermetic Corpus,
and the so-called
Chaldean Oracles.
He presents the manifold variants of the myth of Tiresias, as well as many other sources.
Brisson quotes this material at length and discusses its significance in Graeco-Roman myth and philosophy. These ancient stories open a window onto a world without the sexual oppositions of male and female, a paradise of unity and self-containment, as well as onto the peculiar world of go-betweens like the prophet Tiresias. They deepen our awareness of the extent to which the polarity of sexuality colors our entire perception of the world, as it did in antiquity, and as it does for us now. This provocative material is profoundly relevant to our thinking today.