by Debbie Felton During a recent trip to NYC’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), I stumbled across a beautiful little piece of surrealist art by Leonora Carrington. The Surrealists often used imagery from Greek and other mythologies to express the fantastical and dreamlike aspects of the unconscious and irrational mind, and Carrington’s work is no… Read more Monstrous Surrealism: “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”
“I always think of the Sphinx as the monster who’s come up with the perfect response to mansplaining—when men won’t listen to her riddle properly and try and explain what they think she’s said, she just eats them! Oedipus defeats her by actually listening to her properly, which is a salutary reminder of how rare that quality is in the heroes of Greek myth.”
Today’s guest is Dr. Will Brockliss, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Among his many works, Dr. Brockliss has written Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment (2019) and several articles on Typhoeus, though, surprisingly, this is not his favorite monster!