Vol. 1 No. 2 (2021)
Research Article

Exhaustion and Recycling: The Figures of the Danaids in Babits, Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust

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  • Attila Simon
Attila Simon
Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Múzeum krt. 4/A, 1088 Budapest, Hungary
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2021-2.04

Published 2021-12-20

Keywords

  • Danaids,
  • Mihály Babits,
  • Friedrich Nietzsche,
  • Sigmund Freud,
  • Marcel Proust,
  • modernism,
  • classical reception,
  • reinvention of myth,
  • classical literary tradition,
  • history,
  • psychoanalysis,
  • technology and communication
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Simon, Attila. 2021. “Exhaustion and Recycling: The Figures of the Danaids in Babits, Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust”. Central European Cultures 1 (2):84-118. https://doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2021-2.04.

Copyright (c) 2021 Author(s)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper examines the works of representative modernist authors who have rewritten the myth of the Danaids in a self-reflective way. They reuse certain elements of the myth in order to address some of the crucial issues of cultural transmission: interpretation, poetic tradition and communication. The argument focuses on the recycling of the myth of the Danaids as a symbol of endless historical-philological (Nietzsche) and psychological (Freud) interpretations, the exhaustion and the reinvention of the classical literary tradition (Babits), and the impossible possibility of mediating the living voice through telephonic communication (Proust).

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