Oedipus on the Road is a rendering of the journey that leads Oedipus from Thebes to Colonus - and from a world of exile to one of legend. This is the chapter that Sophocles never wrote, the redemptive passage of the fallen, blinded king to his final - this time glorious - encounter with destiny. Bauchau finds Oedipus stranded outside the walls of his former palace, eye sockets and soul still bleeding, and leads him - along with his daughter Antigone and the seductive shepherd-bandit Clius, whose loyalty to the pair probably has less to do with his allegiance to Oedipus than his intentions toward his daughter - through a geographical and spiritual landscape littered with the physical, artistic, and mental rites of passage that separate Oedipus from immortality.

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On March 30, 1992, Tom Dodge lost his stepfather and inherited the duty of caring for his mother, a woman he confesses he never got to know. Suddenly he was confronted with the extent to which she had slipped into the fog of Alzheimer's. During his childhood, Dodge was never allowed to bring up the topic of his birth, but his mind whirled with questions: Who was my real father? Where was he? Who am I? Now, even if he summoned the courage to ask for the truth, would she be able to tell him? This memoir, interweaving the twin themes of adult responsiblity for a parent suffering from Alzheimer's and the search for a birth parent, is a painful account, raw with emotion, of an alienated adolescence. But it is also a nostalgic look back at life in small-town Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, a life where young boys frolicked in the swimming hole and worked in the family garden. Oedipus Road is a timeless and timely, funny and heart-breaking, evocative account of one man's journey down the road of self-discovery.

When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle—he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture’s central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and dangerous realm where rules and limits are not known—Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a fresh account of this mythic encounter and how it deals with the concepts of liminality and otherness. Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story’s meanings and functions in classical antiquity—from its presence in ancient vase painting to its absence in Sophocles’s tragedy—before arriving at two of its major reworkings in European modernity: the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. Through her readings, she highlights the ambiguous status of the Sphinx and reveals Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, providing key insights into Sophocles’s portrayal and establishing a theoretical framework that organizes evaluations of the myth’s reception in the twentieth century. Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition experienced by all of humankind, Renger situates myth between the competing claims of science and art in an engagement that has important implications for current debates in literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural history, and aesthetics.

The ancient Greek tragedy about the exiled king’s final days—and the power struggle between his two sons. The second book in the trilogy that begins with Oedipus Rex and concludes with Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus is the story of an aged and blinded Oedipus anticipating his death as foretold by an earlier prophecy. Accompanied by his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, he takes up residence in the village of Colonus near Athens—where the locals fear his very presence will curse them. Nonetheless they allow him to stay, and Ismene informs him his sons are battling each other for the throne of Thebes. An oracle has pronounced that the location of their disgraced father’s final resting place will determine which of them is to prevail. Unfortunately, an old enemy has his own plans for the burial, in this heart-wrenching play about two generations plagued by misfortune from the world’s great ancient Greek tragedian.

Cultures of all epochs have consulted oracles in times of need. This fascinating exploration of the enduring popularity of oracles examines how they are interpreted and why. Taking examples from literature and history, from the oracles at Delphi to those in Macbeth, and further still to the works of Kafka and Bob Dylan, and even in the film The Matrix, Wood combines storytelling and commentary to provide a lively account of humanity's persistent faith in signs, which continues to exert an important influence on the course of civilization.

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