• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.69-91
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• 2012

Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats.... (1998) is the last play of the trilogy of "the midlands plays" which can be regarded as her re-writing of both Euripides' Medea and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World by resetting the two plays in the midlands of contemporary Ireland. Carr intends to courageously explore into the dangerous liminal space, i.e., the middle between the past and the present, the high Greek and the Irish folk culture, dealing with the ghosts of the dead writers for her own Irish feminist theatre. Thus, in the middle Carr can build a new Irish theatre by minorating and abjecting the Greek tragedy and subverting and expanding Synge's theatre of grotesque realism. This paper attempts to read By the Bog of Cats... as Carr's final project of exploration into the midland of Ireland to establish a new Irish feminist theatre and at the same time a new Irish folk theatre. By focusing on her strategies of minoration and subversion through grotesque imagery and carnival rituals it argues that Carr put Hester's becoming-ghost in the middle, the bog of the cats as both grave and womb, waiting for the birth of a new Irish people. And it emphasizes that the ghost of Hester, merging with the ghosts of her mother and daughter by the bog of cats will haunt the official society as a threatening abjection, challenging the restoration of the social order.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.889-910
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• 2011

Heracles has been adored as one of the bravest mythical heroes all times and all places because it was thought that he protected his people and lands from invasion, plunder, or enslavement. However, I argue Heracles should be criticized as a war machine of violence and murder. War is homicide itself, which means humans kill humans, unlike other violent and sensual animals such as dogs, apes or pigs. It is ironically ambivalent to celebrate an excellent hero in homicide in this age of nuclear weapons. This irony leads to S. Freud's 'Death instinct' or Malcolm Potts's 'war genes'. Unlike Freud, Malcolm Potts insists that humans' war genes can be changed into peace genes because they were just remains of Stone Age. According to Apollodoros' myth or Euripides' tragedies, he was mad enough to kill his own sons and wife after he had murdered the king Lycos in Thebes. Though Rene Girard says that his madness was derived from contagion of violence and blood, I think that his madness came from horrible experiences of cruel wars as well as Hera's maltreatment in his childhood. It will be demonstrated to be war neurosis, that is, PTSD(Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). In a different way from the modern media in which Heracles is being glorified as a purest macho and war machine, his old myths show the ambivalence of his violence and murder, and his daily misfortunes owing to his madness. In this sense, his myth is a kind of warning to the humans not to kill each other, or to stop wars.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.393-398
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• 2022

Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) uses Iphigeneia in Aulis written by Euripides, one of the three great Greek tragedies writers, as the archetypal narrative. Thus, Lanthimos introduces a mythical world stained with 'blood violence by a divine being' within the cinematic diegesis of a modern American metropolis. And the mythical motifs of curses and scapegoats are varied. This thesis tried to read the scapegoat mechanism, the oldest mechanism of escape from the crisis of collective sacrifice, and the imitative and mutual characteristics of desire and violence through René Girard through the mythical world built in the modern time and space of the film. Martin places a cursed oracle on Steven when his desire to place him in his father's place is thwarted. The 'good' reciprocity between two people is rapidly transformed into a 'bad' reciprocity. The Killing of Sacred Deer is an excellent portrayal of how the scapegoat mechanism works through Steven's family. The selection of the scapegoat by lot gives the sacrificial lamb a sacred character thanks to its divine nature, and the scapegoat becomes a sacred being, and the family order is re-established.