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drama of Appollonian-Dionysian opposition: Euripides's "The Bacchae" and Schrader's "Kiss of the Spider Woman"

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Date Issued:
1996
Summary:
The Apollonian-Dionysian duality is a mythical opposition that suggests a complex and fundamental pattern of looking at the world. In this opposition Nietzsche identified two antagonistic tendencies whose tense coexistence is a prerequisite of the tragic genre; in his formulation tragic conflict must essentially involve a tension between rationality and irrationality, at the level of plot, character, genre. I adopt this symbolic mythical pattern to explore the theme of dramatic conflict in an ancient play, Euripides's The Bacchae, and in a modern text, Schrader's screenplay Kiss of the Spider Woman. At the heart of both these dramatic works there lies a profound and balanced conflict between illusion and reality, emotion and reason, pragmatism and idealism, nature and culture, a conflict structured according to the Apollonian-Dionysian matrix. This thesis explores the connections between the two texts and reveals that their common predicament consists of an unsettled dramatic opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian imaginative realms.
Title: The drama of Appollonian-Dionysian opposition: Euripides's "The Bacchae" and Schrader's "Kiss of the Spider Woman".
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Name(s): Trifan, Alex.
Florida Atlantic University, Degree grantor
Pearce, Howard D., Thesis advisor
Type of Resource: text
Genre: Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation
Issuance: monographic
Date Issued: 1996
Publisher: Florida Atlantic University
Place of Publication: Boca Raton, Fla.
Physical Form: application/pdf
Extent: 79 p.
Language(s): English
Summary: The Apollonian-Dionysian duality is a mythical opposition that suggests a complex and fundamental pattern of looking at the world. In this opposition Nietzsche identified two antagonistic tendencies whose tense coexistence is a prerequisite of the tragic genre; in his formulation tragic conflict must essentially involve a tension between rationality and irrationality, at the level of plot, character, genre. I adopt this symbolic mythical pattern to explore the theme of dramatic conflict in an ancient play, Euripides's The Bacchae, and in a modern text, Schrader's screenplay Kiss of the Spider Woman. At the heart of both these dramatic works there lies a profound and balanced conflict between illusion and reality, emotion and reason, pragmatism and idealism, nature and culture, a conflict structured according to the Apollonian-Dionysian matrix. This thesis explores the connections between the two texts and reveals that their common predicament consists of an unsettled dramatic opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian imaginative realms.
Identifier: 15296 (digitool), FADT15296 (IID), fau:12067 (fedora)
Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
Note(s): Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 1996.
Subject(s): Conflict (Psychology) in literature
Tragic, The, in literature
Apollo (Greek deity) in literature
Dionysus (Greek deity) in literature
Euripides--Bacchae
Schrader, Leonard--Kiss of the spider woman
Held by: Florida Atlantic University Libraries
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/15296
Sublocation: Digital Library
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Use and Reproduction: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Host Institution: FAU
Is Part of Series: Florida Atlantic University Digital Library Collections.