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Showing posts from February, 2026

Agostino in the villetta

 Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I sighed during this week's read, and that's only for the beginning. But what an optimal time it was to read Agostino , considering that I recently learned a little more about Freud's ideas (what a silly, peculiar figure he was) and coincidentally was revisiting the rendition of Oedipus that I grew up on.  It's this thread that I'd like to pull on this week--especially because it is relevant to the question presented in lecture (what kind of effect does the omission of certain details create?). I learned the story of Oedipus from a particular series of books on Greek mythology (no, it was not Percy Jackson) when I was very young, and the choice words that the narration used throughout the series to signify the occurrence of sex were 'married' and 'fell in love' or 'made love', which certainly seem like curious and inaccurate substitutes now . ...