Half in love with easeful Death’: The Mythopoetics of Louise Glück’s AVERNO” | ||||
| مجلة البحث العلمي في الآداب | ||||
| Article 25, Volume 20, العدد العشرون الجزء التاسع - Serial Number 9, December 2019, Page 126-146 PDF (431.32 K) | ||||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jssa.2019.75619 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
Iman Farouk Mohamed El Bakary 
| ||||
| Associate Professor Department of English Language & Literature Faculty of Arts Ain Shams University | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| This paper examines the poetry collection entitled Averno (2006) by the contemporary American poet Louise Glück (1943) from different perspectives. Highlighting her contribution to American women’s poetry, the study focuses on her feminist, post-confessional poetry which manifests itself in her revisionist interpretation of the myth of Persephone, Demeter and Hades. By opting for the traditional myth of the abduction of Persephone by Pluto/Hades and the heroine’s divided existence between two worlds; namely the earth and the underworld, Glück achieves many goals. On the one hand, she subverts the female-as-object paradigm, by giving voice to the traditionally helpless victim. Thus, the female writer challenges the patriarchal, interpretational framework of traditional myth. On the other hand, the poet reflects on her own disappointment with love by using the mask of myth, thus avoiding direct confessionalism. Furthermore, Glück’s infatuation with death attracts her to Averno, the gateway to the underworld. She keeps oscillating between this troubled life on earth, and a possibly blissful oblivion in death. This causes her to move back and forth, hesitating, contemplating both realms, conflating past and present, and myth with contemporary reality. Consequently, her poetry collection, characterized by simple yet bitter, terse, occasionally violent language, is best read as a whole. Its individual poems present the reader with puzzling, contradictory scenarios, open to various interpretations. Herein lies the originality and complexity of Averno by Louise Glück. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Poetry; Louise Glück; Averno – feminism – revisionist mythmaking – myth; Persephone | ||||
| References | ||||
|
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875 – 893. https://links.jstor.org/sici=0097- 9740%28197622%291%3A40%3C875%3ATLOTM Accessed 24/8/2019 Daifotis, Melanie. “The Myth of Persephone: Body Objectification from Ancient to Modern” CMC Senior Theses.1529. (2017) https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1529 Accessed 6/8/2019 Glück, Louise. Averno. Edited by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, 2006. E Book. www.fsgbooks.com Accessed 18/8/2019 ----------------. “Louise Glück Biography”. www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louiseglück Accessed 10/7/2019 Hurst, Isobel. “Love and Blackmail: Demeter and Persephone”, Classical Reception Journal, Vol. 4, Issue 2 (2012), pp. 176 – 189. http://crj.oxfordjournals.org Accessed 14/8/2019. Keniston, Ann. “Balm after Violence: Louise Glück‟s Averno”. The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Fall 2008), pp. 177 – 187. https://www.jstor.org/stable/276538776 Accessed 8/11/2019. Longenbach, James. “Louise Glück‟s Nine Lives”, Southwest Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (1999), pp. 184 -198. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43472558 Accessed 10/11/2019 McDaniel, Jeffrey. “Post-confessional poetry?” www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/06 Accessed 18/12/2019 Miller, Madeline. “Myth of the Week: Persephone”. Monday, December 5th , 2011. madelinemiller.com/myth-of-the-week-persephone Accessed 8/7/2019 Half in love with easeful Death’: The Mythopoetics of Louise Glück’s AVERNO” ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Journal of Scientific Research in Arts 9 (2019) - 146 - Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. Columbia and London: Univeersity of Missouri Press, 2006. Ebook. www.worldcat.org/title/poetry-of-louise-gluck-a-thematic-introduction Accessed 9/10/2019 Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women‟s Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Alicia_Suskin_Ostriker_Stealing_the_Language_Th(z-lib.org).pdf Accessed 15/11/2019 Plunkett, Adam. “The Knife – The Sharp Poetry of Louise Glück”, The New Republic, January 8, 2013. https://newrepublic.com/article/111697/louise-gluck-collected-poems Accessed 16/7/2019 Ramirez, Estella. “Review of Averno”. www.frontporchjournal. com/issue50_review_averno.asp Accessed 6/8/2019 Sadoff, Ira. “Louise Glück and the Last Stage of Romanticism”. New England Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Fall, 2001), pp. 81 -92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40244581 Accessed 8/11/2019 Wheatley, David. “In the Dark Tunnel: Strong is Your Hold by Galway Kinnel: Averno by Louise Glück”. The Poetry Ireland Review, No. 92 (2007), pp. 82 – 85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25578456 Accessed 8/11/2019 Yezzi, David. “Cassandra at the Evening Window: Louise Glück‟s Dark Visions”. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 120, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 103 -117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41337930 Accessed 8/11/2019 Zajko, Vanda and Leonard, Miriam, Eds. Laughing with Medusa: Classic | ||||
|
Statistics Article View: 423 PDF Download: 1,840 |
||||
