The Crime Scene of Revenge Tragedy

dc.contributor.authorCarol Mejia LaPerleen_US
dc.date.accessioned2016-04-26T05:54:49Z
dc.date.available2016-04-26T05:54:49Z
dc.date.issued2012-03-??
dc.description.abstractAnalyzing the parallel gestures of ritualistic brutality deployed in the cannibal banquet of Seneca’s Thyestes and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, I reveal how the genre of revenge tragedies is simultaneously an instance of, and challenge to, Georges Bataille’s socio-economic theory of excess within a general economy. Excess, and not scarcity, is the motive and the condition for revenge. Both revengers react to a surplus of energy, or what I will call the “excess of possibilities,” that threatens autonomy. Thus, the victims of revenge embody the excess of possibilities in the plays since they are reminders of the contingency, and potential indistinguishability, of the agents of revenge. Sacrificial cannibalism emerges as the revenger’s means for autonomous differentiation, thus eliminating the unbearable interchangeability generated by surplus. Furthermore, by theorizing the excess of possibilities as the underlying pressure driving Atreus as a Senecan revenge figure, I argue that the citation of a specifically Senecan cannibal banquet, appropriated in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, is a gesture by the author to sacrifice, and thus gratuitously consume, the surplus violence generated by the act of representation itself.en_US
dc.identifierBA2FCB71-30EA-36A6-F1C5-D5318329B64B
dc.identifier.urihttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/77637
dc.language英文
dc.publisher英語學系zh_tw
dc.publisherDepartment of English, NTNUen_US
dc.relation38(1),9-28
dc.relation.ispartof同心圓:文學與文化研究zh_tw
dc.subject.otherrevenge tragedyen_US
dc.subject.otherBatailleen_US
dc.subject.otherSenecaen_US
dc.subject.otherThyestesen_US
dc.subject.otherShakespeareen_US
dc.subject.otherTitus Andronicusen_US
dc.subject.othercannibalismen_US
dc.titleThe Crime Scene of Revenge Tragedyzh-tw

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