Topic
Katabasis
About: Katabasis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 58 publications have been published within this topic receiving 225 citations. The topic is also known as: Descent to the underworld & catabasis.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
26 Oct 2004
TL;DR: In this article, a map of reading about the katabatic imagination in the twenty-first century is presented, with a focus on the descent and return of a person from a life to Hell.
Abstract: Introduction Descent and Return: the katabatic imagination Chapter 1 - Hell in Our Time (i) Is Hell a fable? (ii) Hell as the modern condition (iii) Descent and dissent in modern philosophy Chapter 2 - Chronotopes of Hell (i) Generic features of katabatic narrative (ii) Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes (iii) Unspeakable wisdom (iv) Conversion versus inversion (v) Katabatic inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (vi) The absolute and my absolute: Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words Chapter 3 - Auschwitz as Hell (i) Pathways through a life: Primo Levi's The Search for Roots (ii) Black Holes and the Book of Job (iii) A constellation of chronotopes: If This is a Man (a) Threshold crossing into Hell (b) Auschwitz as education (c) The visionary world (d) On trial in Hell (e) Sea-voyage and shipwreck (iv) The intersection of pathways Chapter 4 - Surviving with Ghosts: Second Generation Holocaust Narratives (i) Bog-boys and fire-children (ii) Vertigo and luminosity: W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (iii) From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces Chapter 5 - Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness (i) Down the rabbit hole (ii) Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (iii) The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome Silence (iv) Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm, A Memoir with Lies Chapter 6 - Engendering Dissent in the Underworld (i) Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell (ii) Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (iii) Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (iv) Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette Chapter 7 - Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots (i) Karl Marx's katabasis (ii) Postmodern capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark (iii) Lanark's search for roots (iv) Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? Chapter 8 - East-West Descent Narratives (i) Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East (ii) Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects (iii) The migrations of Orpheus, in five acts: Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (a) Threshold crossing (b) Ground Zero (c) Looking back (d) Dismemberment (e) Return of another Epilogue - Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century (i) 9/11: the first circle (ii) Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again) (iii) Global fear and its inversions Appendix - Primo Levi, 'Map of reading' Bibliography Index.
44 citations
Book•
1 Dec 1998
TL;DR: In this paper, the Unity of the Polis as a Key to the Interpretation of Plato's Republic is discussed, as well as the use of Myths, exemplified by the Katabasis of Er.
Abstract: CONTENTS: How Totalitarian is Plato's Republic; Plato as a Problem-Solver. The Unity of the Polis as a Key to the Interpretation of Plato's Republic; Plato and Xenophon: Two Contributions to the Constitutional Debate in the 4th Century BC; Did Plato ever Reply to those Critics, who Reproached him for 'the Emptiness of the Platonic Idea or Form of the Good'?; The Socratic Paradoxes and the Tripartite Soul; Eudaimonia in Plato's Republic; Plato's Ideal of Science; The Katabasis of Er. Plato's Use of Myths, exemplified by the Myth of Er; Index of Names; Index of Key Terms.
30 citations
30 citations
TL;DR: Hercules Unchained (1959) is often reviled as a cheesy sword-and-sandal film, incapable of being rehabilitated as mentioned in this paper, despite the banality of the film, the sum of its various parts presents a coherent and suggestive narrative whose bizarre articulation parallels, albeit unwittingly, the absurdist productions of the post-WWI Surrealists.
Abstract: The film Hercules Unchained (1959) is often reviled as a cheesy sword-and-sandal film, incapable of being rehabilitated. \"Hercules Unchained: Contaminatio, Nostos, Katabasis and the Surreal\" argues that, despite the banality of the film, the sum of its various parts presents a coherent and suggestive narrative whose bizarre articulation parallels, albeit unwittingly, the absurdist productions of the post-WWI Surrealists. The fantastically grotesque and literarily impossible combination of Hercules, Ulysses, and Oedipus ultimately resolves, mirabile dictu, in the theme of loss of identity. Set within a context of coming home from war, this extraordinarily kitsch \"descent into hell\" offered its contemporary audience a looking-glass reflection of the anxieties of the soldiers who were still coming home from WWII and Korea.
19 citations
Book•
1 Apr 2021
TL;DR: Riley as mentioned in this paper explores the idea of homecoming and its attendant pain in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney's Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo's Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca.
Abstract: ‘Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one’, said Charles Dickens, ‘stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’ The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as ‘a teeming word … a haunted word … a word to conjure with’. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer’s Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, as Pope’s translation has it). From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, ‘Ithaca’ has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past;it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo’s Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope. © Kathleen Riley 2021.
15 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 2 |
| 2020 | 1 |
| 2019 | 4 |
| 2018 | 3 |
| 2017 | 4 |
| 2016 | 4 |