Walking in the house of Daedalus – An analysis of the katabasis motif in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves   This study analyses the depiction of the labyrinth as a symbolic landscape in regard to both subject and form in the multi-layered novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Using the mythological katabasis motif as a structural principle, this study discusses modern labyrinthine narratives wherein selfhood is constructed through an infernal journey between a descent and a return. This study analyses the novel with a thematic perspective from two points of view; how the labyrinth acts as central motif for the self in the novel and how the novel visually depicts the narrative through typographical choices throughout the text. The study’s main question is how the novel depicts the labyrinth in regard to its historical and cultural context and how it inscribes itself into a tradition of narratives that depicts the labyrinth as a metaphor for the mind and as a symbol for the exploration of the self.   The result shows that House of Leaves uses a complex cluster of narratives to tell a katabatic story, both through the narrative and the form. Through the symbolic landscape and through the use of a genre typical and uncanny horror story, House of Leaves tells a story about alienation, guilt and love where the characters psychological developments changes in regard to confrontations with the labyrinth and through the symbolical tests that exists throughout the katabatic journey. The characters ascends traumatized from the labyrinth, but are at the same time rewarded with personal insight

L’amour, la mort et la souffrance sont parmi les expériences les plus incompréhensibles que l’homme doit affronter dans sa vie. Elles définissent sa nature et font partie intégrante de son univers symbolique. Le saut de Leucade aurait été pratiqué pendant plus de mille ans. À la fois présent dans les récits mythiques, religieux et historiques, le rituel est attesté par les premiers historiens de l’Antiquité qui décrivent ce phénomène à partir des données de l’historiographie antique. La forme traditionnelle du saut s’inscrit dans l’univers mythologique des Grecs et le plongeon est un acte de délivrance de la passion amoureuse. La nature du rituel change selon les contextes littéraires, passant d’un rite érotique à un rituel apotropaïque pour se voir perpétuer de manière désacralisée dans les récits plus tardifs. L’analyse des différentes fonctions du saut semble démontrer le profil d’une expérience limite, où la mort serait vécue de manière métaphorique et pose le problème de la nature ordalique du rituel qui serait à la base de son efficacité pragmatique. Cette étude projette d’analyser les formes de la pensée grecque dans son expression anthropologique à travers la dialectique du mythe et du rite et vise à comprendre l’interprétation de la souffrance amoureuse dans le cadre du rituel de précipitation. Le saut de Leucade serait dès lors un discours spécifique qui témoignerait d’une certaine conception de la nature humaine, de la mort et de la souffrance amoureuse dans l’imaginaire de la Grèce ancienne. / Love, death and suffering are among some of the most incomprehensible experiences confronting man during his life. They define his nature and make up an integral part of his symbolic universe. The Leucadian Leap is deemed to have been practiced for more than a thousand years. Appearing in mythical, religious as well as in historical narratives, the ritual is attested by the first historians in Antiquity who explain this phenomenon from the data of the antique historiography. The traditional meaning of the leap is inscribed in Greek mythological context and the leap is thus relief from passionate love. The nature of the ritual changes according to literary contexts, from a purely erotic rite, to a apotropaic rite, to see it being perpetuated in a deconsecrated manner in later texts. Analysis of the different functions of the leap seem to point toward an extreme death-defying experience where death was experienced in a metaphorical manner and provides a hypothesis for the ritual’s ordalic nature as a basis for its pragmatic efficiency. This study purports to analyze the Greek mental forms as expressed anthropologically through the dialectic of myth and ritual and aims at understanding the interpretation of love suffering within the context of a leaping ritual in Ancient Greece. The Leucadian Leap would thus appear to correspond to a specific discourse which would testify to a certain conception of human nature, of death, of love and of suffering in Ancient Greece’s collective imagination.

The aim of this study is to analyse the thematic purpose of death in J.M. Barries play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Peter Pan, the Darlings and Neverland each get analysed in separate chapters, to get a fuller understanding of their relation to death. This has been done through the use of copingtheory, and comparisons to earlier myths about catabasis, Pan, and British changelings. Further support has been found through earlier works written about the subject, to deepen the understanding of death’s part in this play for children. The essay concludes that the children in the play are deathly ill – and thus Neverland and Peter Pan are representations of the afterlife, and a spirit which guides children on from this life in to the next.

No description available.