Dionysian Revival in American Fiction of the Sixties

• Autores: John Carlevale
• Localización: International journal of the classical tradition, ISSN 1073-0508, Vol. 12, Nº 3, 2006, págs. 364-391
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • During the sixties (1958¿74), many writers, scholars, and intellectuals adopted Dionysus as a symbol for the sexual and psychic liberation heralded by the ¿New Sensibility.¿ Norman O. Brown¿s synthesis of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche made him the era¿s most influential proponent of the Dionysian. The character of Brown¿s apocalyptic Dionysus of the New Sensibility emerges in contrast to the tragic conception of the Dionysian in William Golding¿s Lord of the Flies. Four fictions of the sixties respond to and test Brown¿s Dionysianism more or less explicitly: Robert Silverberg¿s ¿The Feast of St. Dionysus,¿ Roderick Thorp¿s Dionysus, Saul Bellow¿s Herzog, and Gore Vidal¿s Myra Breckinridge. Where Silverberg and Thorp welcome the Dionysian with an enthusiasm akin to Brown¿s, Bellow and Vidal reckon with the god¿s ambivalent double nature as liberator and destroyer