The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx

Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque

Yuan Yuan

The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

University Press of America

Pages: 248 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-0-7618-6662-6 • Hardback • April 2016 • $92.00 • (£71.00)

978-0-7618-6663-3 • eBook • April 2016 • $87.00 • (£67.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis, Art / Art & Politics, Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance, Philosophy / Aesthetics, Literary Criticism / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx

Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

Details

University Press of America

Pages: 248 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-0-7618-6662-6 • Hardback • April 2016 • $92.00 • (£71.00)

978-0-7618-6663-3 • eBook • April 2016 • $87.00 • (£67.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis, Art / Art & Politics, Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance, Philosophy / Aesthetics, Literary Criticism / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Author

Yuan Yuan is Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. He is the author of The Discourse of Fantasy: Theoretical and Fictional Perspectives, translator of Nobel Prize writer Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March, guest editor of The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Special Issue on Dream and Narrative Space. He has contributed articles to Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures, Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, Readerly/Writerly Texts, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, European Joyce Studies Annual.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Return of the Grotesque
Part One: The Primal Scenes Revisited: Archeology and Genealogy of the Grotesque
Chapter 1. The Uncanny Subject between Aesthetics and Metaphysics
Chapter 2. The Mystical Encounter between the Sphinx and Oedipus
Part Two: Reconfiguring the Grotesque between the Sphinx and Oedipus
Chapter 3. The Enigmatic Sphinx: The Grotesque Other in Aesthetic Speculation
Chapter 4. Oedipus Obsessed: Grotesque Desire and the Phantom Subject
Part Three: The Subject of the Other(s) in Ontology and Heterologies
Chapter 5. Oracles and Ghosts: The Dubious Others in Lacan’s Discourse of the Subject
Chapter 6. From Ontology to Heterologies: A Postmodern Perspective on Otherness
Afterword: The Cyborg: A Post-human Return to the Grotesque
Bibliography
Index