Tragedy, Euripides, Melodrama: Hamartia, Medea, Liminality

This article examines socio-historical dimensions and cultural and dramaturgic implications of the Greek playwright Euripides’ treatment of the myth of Medea. Euripides gives voice to victims of adventurism, aggression and betrayal in the name of ‘reason’ and the ‘state’ or ‘polity.’ Medea constitutes one of the most powerful mythic forces to which he gave such voice by melodramatizing the disturbing liminality of Greek tragedy’s perceived social and cultural order. The social polity is confronted by an apocalyptic shock to its order and its available modes of emotional, rational and social interpretation. Euripidean melodramas of horror dramatize the violation of rational categories and precipitate an abject liminality of the tragic vision of rational order. The dramaturgy of Euripides’ Medea is contrasted with the norms of Greek tragedy and examined in comparison with other adaptations — both ancient and contemporary — of the myth of Medea, in order to unfold the play’s transgression of a tragic vision of the social polity.

Disorder and disconnection: parent experiences of liminality when caring for a dying child

Parents caring for a child with a life threatening or life limiting illness experience a protracted and largely unknown journey, as they and their child oscillate somewhere between life and death. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, interviews were conducted with parents (n = 25) of children who had died. Findings reveal parents’ experiences to be characterised by personal disorder and transformation as well as social marginalisation and disconnection. As such they confirm the validity of understanding these experiences as, fundamentally, one of liminality, in terms of both individual and collective response. In dissecting two inter-related dimensions of liminality, an underlying tension between how transition is subjectively experienced and how it is socially regulated is exposed. In particular, a structural failure to recognise the chronic nature of felt liminality can impede parents’ effective transition.

Crossing the Threshold: Mysticism, Liminality, and Remedios Varo’s Bordando el manto terrestre (1961–2)

In this article we propose to take up the question of the painter’s work in connection with liminality more explicitly. We will argue that the limen Varo’s heroines cross is a psychological one that takes them through a process culminating in a rebirth of the self, and that to the extent they are in-between identities and involved in a process of initiation, they can be considered liminars (Turner). We will also argue that in order to develop this theme, which culminates in her most autobiographical work, the triptych Bordando el manto terrestre (1961–2), the artist needed to find a way conceptually to bridge surrealism and her interest in mysticism. She would have found a sympathetic approach in Jung, one of the founders of psychoanalysis, who turned explicitly to the question of religion in the troubled thirties, though, as we shall see, she revised his androcentric approach. We will suggest that Jung’s writing helped the artist make a transition from surrealism to esoteric spirituality.

'A Romanian Perspective on Brian Friel's Translations'

Based on the premise that the history of the representation in drama of the Ulster "Troubles" has been characterised by a move from direct to metaphorical engagement, this paper seeks to explore the signficance of Brian Friel's Translations as a "Troubles Drama" with reference to a production of the play I directed for the Hungarian Theater of Cluj in the Fall of 2001. Interpreting a play about language in a language other than the one in which it was originally written proved to have many implications for the rehearsal process and led me to experiment with the image theatre techniques of Augusto Boal. The nature of Cluj/Kolozsvar as a bi-lingual city added to the complexities of the process, as did my own status as an English-speaking director in a Hungarian-speaking environment. The extraordinary neautre of the wider geopolitical context at the time of the production proved to be the final ingredient in what became an exceptional empirical process of discovery. The discussion of the particular production is placed in the wider context of an exposition of a theory of "cultural gravity" as an alternative to "liminality" in helping to assess the cultural signficance of geopolitical boundaries.

Children’s Burial Grounds in Ireland (Cilliní) and Parental Emotions Toward Infant Death

Cilliní—or children’s burial grounds—were the designated resting places for unbaptized infants and other members of Irish society who were considered unsuitable by the Roman Catholic Church for burial in consecrated ground. The sites appear to have proliferated from the seventeenth century onwards in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. While a number of previous studies have attempted to relate their apparently marginal characteristics to the liminality of Limbo, evidence drawn from the archaeological record and oral history accounts suggests that it was only the Roman Catholic Church that considered cilliní, and those interred within, to be marginal. In contrast, the evidence suggests that the families of the dead regarded the cemeteries as important places of burial and treated them in a similar manner to consecrated burial grounds.

Betwixt spaces: Students’ accounts of turning point experiences in first-year transitions

'Not belonging' is becoming a prevalent theme within accounts of the first-year student experience at university. In this study the notion of not belonging is extended by assuming a more active role for the idea of liminality in a student's transition into the university environments of academic and student life. In doing so, the article suggests that the transition between one place (home) and another (university) can result in an 'in-between-ness' - a betwixt space. Through an interpretative methodology, the study explores how students begin to move from this betwixt space into feeling like fully-fledged members of university life. It is concluded that there is a wide range of turning points associated with the students' betwixt transition, which shapes, alters or indeed accentuates the ways in which they make meaningful connections with university life. Moreover, transitional turning point experiences reveal a cast of characters and symbolic objects; capture contrasting motivations and evolving relationships; display multiple trajectories of interpersonal tensions and conflicts; highlight discontinuities as well as continuities; and together, simultaneously liberate and constrain the students' transition into university life.

Poetic Inquiry, Consumer Vulnerability: Realities of Quadriplegia

Alternative forms of research interpretation have been utilised within the social sciences. Poetic inquiry, an area of growing interest influences readership affectively as well as intelligently. Incorporating interview data as a poetic submission, this paper intends to reflexively capture, emotional intensity, hopelessness, liminality, voicelessness and self-transformative realities attendant to those experiencing vulnerability. The unintelligible language that can appropriate the poetic form, supports the elucidation of hidden narratives of more vulnerable inscapes. Consumer vulnerability lends itself to the power of poetry for legitimacy of the moment, where sensory imagery and nonce words attend hiatuses common in scientific discourse. The poetic inquiry, Vulnerability in Parts, is elicited from wider research with homebound consumers conducted over a two-year period, which draws on one homebound consumer’s experience of quadriplegia.

Navigating the Borderlands: Brian McGilloway as Contemporary Cartographer of the Liminal in the Ulster Landscape

Set in the borderlands between Letterkenny and Derry-Londonderry, a landscape scarred by geological fold, river and cartographer’s pen, the Ulster crime novelist Brian McGilloway chronicles the hopes and fears of a contemporary society unable to escape a complicated history, redolent and entwined with the voices of its ‘ghosts of its past.’ Through his choice of chief protagonist, An Garda Síochána officer Benedict Devlin, McGilloway turns detective to critically investigate the both the seemingly straightforward and the unseen dwelling in the rural Ulster landscape. Following in the footsteps of Nordic and Tartan Noir in making commentary on current societ,y McGilloway recognises the importance of the past in trying to reach an understanding of the present. His critique however goes beyond criminal behaviour motivated primarily by politics or religion, allowing a deeper and more meaningful diagnosis of the ‘state of the nation’. Place, name and event become especially important in contextualising the liminality of McGilloway’s real rural border settings. In doing so, McGilloway continues in the rich tradition of Ulster poet such as Heaney, MacNiece, Muldoon and Hewitt in trying to rationalise the man-made amidst the elemental in the land of both the ‘Planter & The Gael.’ History, language, tradition and the sacral are all instruments of investigation in helping McGilloway present a revealing pathology and atlas of our times to his readers. Turning literary investigator, the author contends that there is much to learn from this physiography, not just for the borderlands region, but for the wider countryside and society beyond. Keywords Cultural Atlas, Crime Fiction, Place, Poetry, Rural.