The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx: Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque

The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

About the Author

Yuan Yuan is Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. He is the author of The Discourse of Fantasy: Theoretical and Fictional Perspectives, translator of Nobel Prize writer Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March, guest editor of The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Special Issue on Dream and Narrative Space. He has contributed articles to Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures, Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, Readerly/Writerly Texts, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, European Joyce Studies Annual.