The King & the Adulteress: A Psychoanalytical and Literary Reinterpretation of Madame Bovary and King LearDuke University Press, 1998 - 162 pages The King and the Adulteress brings together two essays that propose radically revisionary readings of two of the most important literary works in the Western canon, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Shakespeare's King Lear. In offering a new understanding of a deeply sadomasochistic relationship and of an authoritarian pathology, renowned psychoanalyst Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca combines psychoanalysis with literary studies to challenge the conventional judgments of readers and the stereotyped interpretations of literary critics to these masterpieces. Approaching the characters in Bovary and Lear from both an analytic and a critical viewpoint, Speziale-Bagliacca reinterprets many issues and events that involve archetypal figures of modern literary mythology. In fact, he reverses much of the received opinion about them. Charles Bovary, for example, far from being a victim of his wife's neurotic restlessness or the epitome of a passive imbecile, is a masochist of the highest order who makes a decisive contribution to Emma's miserable end. Lear, rather than a tragedy involving the sweet Cordelia, noble Kent, and the Fool as good and loyal supporters of an old king driven to madness by his overbearing evil daughters, is precisely the opposite. The sympathetic understanding of the reader should go, Speziale-Bagliacca suggests, also to Regan, Goneril, and Edmund, while the king, whose crisis is interpreted in the light of psychoanalytic findings on depression, finally becomes the true unbeloved "bastard" of the play. Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychotherapy at the Medical School of the University of Genoa. He is the author of On the Shoulders of Freud and many other works. |
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Page 7
... fact register and comprehend everything ? Surely Flaubert should have sensed that perception and will might exist unbeknown to the subject who possesses them . Might not Emma behave that way out of a sense of guilt , because she has ...
... fact register and comprehend everything ? Surely Flaubert should have sensed that perception and will might exist unbeknown to the subject who possesses them . Might not Emma behave that way out of a sense of guilt , because she has ...
Page 22
... fact , the Viscount gives the impression of being less valid as a man than Charles , whose patients are very devoted to him ( and to whom Père Rouault is surely grateful ) . Emma is not capable of understanding her husband's complex ...
... fact , the Viscount gives the impression of being less valid as a man than Charles , whose patients are very devoted to him ( and to whom Père Rouault is surely grateful ) . Emma is not capable of understanding her husband's complex ...
Page 91
... fact that her father wants to end his days with her and thus satisfy what Freud would call her " Oedipal " demands ( 1.1.123-24 ) . Perhaps one should attempt to explain Cordelia's " heroic " be- havior more fully . Lear has quite ...
... fact that her father wants to end his days with her and thus satisfy what Freud would call her " Oedipal " demands ( 1.1.123-24 ) . Perhaps one should attempt to explain Cordelia's " heroic " be- havior more fully . Lear has quite ...
Contents
A Wholly Fictitious Story | 54 |
An Essay on King Lear | 81 |
The Barbarous Scythian | 106 |
Copyright | |
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