While in prison, Mandela performed the role of Creon in Antigone. The experience may have helped train him for leadership years later.
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Tag Archives: Sophocles
Antigone Taught Mandela Leadership
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Antigone, Apartheid, Edith Hall, leadership, Nelson Mandela, South Africa Leave a comment
Using Poetry to Stand Up to Tyranny
The poem that uses myth and literature to imagine the possibilities for action in the face of oppression.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Chanson d'automne", “Sleepless Nights", Antigone, Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, Kimm Addonizio, Nelson Mandel, Oedipus, Paul Verlaine Comments closed
Classics to the Rescue in Dark Times
In Trump’s first 100 days, Jill Lepore turned to 100 classics to survive.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "1914", "Fears in Solitude", "Nightingales Are Drunk", "Nose", "Story of the Bad Little Boy", "With Antecedents", Aesop, Antigone, classic literature, Dante, Eclogue II, Edith Wharton, Figure in the Carpet, Frogs Who Demanded a King, Grimm Brothers, Hafez, Henry James, Homer, Inferno, Jill Lepore, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Matsuo Basho, Modest Proposal, Nikolai Gogol, Odyssey, Reckoning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Six Servants, Virgil, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Yoshido Kenkō Comments closed
Are You an Antigone or an Ismene?
In an essay calling Chinese activist Chow Hang Tung “the Antigone of Hong Kong,” Wendy Gan compares herself to Ismene.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged activism, Antigone, authoritarianism, Chinese repression, Chow Hang Tung, Hong Kong, Oedipus in Colonus, political dissent, Power of the Powerless, Tiananmen Square, Vaclav Havel Comments closed
McCarthy a Greek Hero? NOT!
Kevin McCarthy is no tragic hero. He does resemble a minor figure from “Julius Caesar,” however.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Ajax, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Kevin McCarthy, Oedipus, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Got a Problem? Call a Poet
Tragedy, it turns out, is a powerful literary form for dealing with posttraumatic fear.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Angus Fletcher, Aristotle, bibliotherapy, catharsis, literary technique, Oedipus, philosophy, posttraumatic fear, PTSD, Rhetoric, Sigmund Freud, sophists, Wonderworks Comments closed
First They Came for Toni Morrison, Then…
In the right attacks Toni Morrison novels, does this mean that Homer, Dostoevsky, Milton, and Sophocles are next?
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Beloved, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, GOP, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, Toni Morrison Comments closed
The Afghan Debacle, a Greek Tragedy
There’s an element of Greek tragedy in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, starting with arrogance and ending with fate.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Afghan War, Afghanistan withdrawal, Joe Biden, Oedipus Comments closed
Freud: Lit Leads to Self Mastery
A Freudian analysis of why we are drawn to literature and what it does for us.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Bruno Bettelheim, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Interpretation of Dreams, Joseph Conrad, Oedipus, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sigmund Freud Comments closed