Discount Price: $17.95
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.3340938
EAN num: 9780520223912
ISBN number: 0520223918
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 200
Printing Date: March 18, 2002
Publishing house: University of California Press
Sale Popularity Level: 1604246
Studio: University of California Press
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
This fascinating book collects and translates most of the extant written Graeco-Roman material on human beings, divinities, animals, and other creatures who were said to have been both female and male. Luc Brisson provides a commentary that situates this rich source material within its historical and intellectual contexts. These selections--from mythological, philosophical, historical, and anecdotal sources--describe cases of either simultaneous dual sexuality, as in androgyny and in hermaphroditism, or successive dual sexuality, as in the case of Tiresias (the blind Theban prophet), which are found through the whole span of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Sexual Ambivalence is an invaluable sourcebook that gathers this suggestive, yet hard to find, material in one convenient place.
This book presents some very obscure but wonderfully strange material. There is the ghost story about a father who returns from the dead to devour his dual-sexed son in the public square, leaving behind only the head, which proceeds to deliver a prophecy from its position on the ground. In addition to including such familiar sources as the myths of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Aristophanes' myth of the origins of the sexes and sexuality in Plato's Symposium, Brisson also discusses cosmogonic mythology in Hesiodic poetry, the Orphic Rhapsodies, Gnosticism, the Hermetic Corpus, and the so-called Chaldean Oracles. He presents the manifold variants of the myth of Tiresias, as well as many other sources.
Brisson quotes this material at length and discusses its significance in Graeco-Roman myth and philosophy. These ancient stories open a window onto a world without the sexual oppositions of male and female, a paradise of unity and self-containment, as well as onto the peculiar world of go-betweens like the prophet Tiresias. They deepen our awareness of the extent to which the polarity of sexuality colors our entire perception of the world, as it did in antiquity, and as it does for us now. This provocative material is profoundly relevant to our thinking today.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Wispy and suggestive, this little book addresses the historical accounts, mythological examples and religious explanations of dual sexuality in the ancient world. This one is definitely not a treatise in current cultural studies, as the only authors cited are ancients. While Brisson does not stray from his historical task, the dearth of contemporary situational relevance, or comparison even, may be a weakness of the book. However, the accounts are insightful. The chapter on Plato's myth from the concerning the dual-sexuality of original states is a strong one. Also a nice treat, Brisson presents discusion of the Chaldean Oracles and Orphic mysteries within the context of dual sexuality. The former topic in particular appears rarely in writing on general classical culture. Remarkable too, is the relation of early Roman and Etruscan reactions to these hermaphrodite prodigies. This clear little book serves up a handy collection and analysis of incidents, from which, perhaps, one can generalize not only about antiquity's perception of and reaction to sexual duals, but too the value of such dualism as a mythological or philosophical concept.
Find other books like this one:
