Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning

by Christina Britzolakis

The history of Plath's reception as a writer has been one of displacements. Biographical speculation, and the controversy surrounding the posthumous publication of her work, have dominated critical debate at the expense of her poetic and fictional achievement. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning offers a new framework of interpretation for the texts, which attends to their formal complexity without detaching them either from their historical moment or from contemporary debates about language, gender and subjectivity. Interweaving close reading and theoretical reflection, Britzolakis argues that Plath's poetry constitutes a psychic theatre which makes the work of mourning inseparable from its performance in language, and shows how she engaged with the legacy of modernism to arrive at this distinctive mode.

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Dajana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dugo sam ovo čitala, ali ne zato što sam bila lenja, nego zato što je ovo izuzetno kompleksna i kvalitetna analiza Silvije Plat koja u dvestotinak strana obuhvata čitavu njenu poetiku. Mislim da nikad nisam čitala temeljnije i ubedljivije čitanje nekog pesnika, a da je pritom strukturirano besprekorno pregledno.
Ono što uslovno nalazim kao nedostatak ovakvih knjiga jeste to što posle pesnika ili pesnikinju ne mogu da vidim van okvira ovoliko ubedljivih analiza.
Ako ikad u životu napišem makar jednu ovakvu studiju, mislim da će moj akademski život imati smisla. Ovo je kvalitet koji nedostaje mnogim čitanjima Silvije Plat sa informacijama ograničenim na njene dnevnike i privatan život. Kristina Bricolakis ubedljivo pokazuje da je Silvija itetako obrazovana pesnikinja i da je njena poezija mnogo više u dijalogu sa književnom tradicijom no što joj se uglavnom priznaje.

[ANNA fayard · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some great quotes (amongst way too many quotes, and certainly, way too many arguments) by other people writing other books (!)

e.g.
"As Julia Kristeva has argued in her analysis of the poetics of melancholia, if the poet were to surrender to melancholia, there would be no poetry: 'if loss, mourning, absence set the imaginary act in motion and permanently fuel it as much as they menace and undermine it, it is also undeniable that that the fetish of the work of art is erected in a disavowal of this mobilizing affliction. The artist: melancholy's most intimate witness and the most ferocious combatant of the symbolic abdication enveloping him'"

[Steven Critelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books (if not the best book) of literary criticism written on Sylvia Plath. [I will have more to say on this later.]