In Reply to: Re: The power of myth posted by CB on December 17, 2005 at 10:28:27:
"You've examined woman through the eyes of male authors"
The paper was a small survey of literature from the Greek period up to the modern era. There weren't alot of women authors during most of the period which my paper focused on. The only one I was aware of is Sappho. Of course, with enlightenment that changed and many women gained fame through their writing, though sometimes under a man's name. However, I was interested in examining the roots of misogyny in literature and tracing that through time. This was the beginning of my interest in human rights issues.
Most of my secondary sources for the paper were women writers. For example, Dorothy Wender - "Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile, and Feminist", and Anne Carson - "Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire", and Helen Sword - "Orpheus and Eurydice in the 20th Century: Lawrence, H.D. and the Poetics of the Turn". The paper ends with a discussion of the 20th century poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). That's where the title "Calypso Speaks" comes from, one of her poems. Many of her works are revisions of myths. She deconstructs a classic myth, for example, her poem "Eurydice", and reconstructs it from an assertive female perspective. In that respect she was different from her fellow mythmaking poets such as Yeats, Pound, Williams and Eliot, who also sought new symbols for a modern world by transfroming old mythologies. The difference is that her revisions necessarily include a reevaluation of patriarchal foundations.
I will eventually get to Nietzche's book, but gotta finish the DaVinci book first. I've borrowed it from the library twice now. It's so long I couldn't finish before I had to return it. No renewals because there's a long wait list for this one, so now that I've got it again I'm gonna try and get to the end of it this time. It really is very interesting, and it's fairly light reading, though long. I say light reading because it doesn't require much thinking, kinda like a novel.