Reflections of the Aging Caesar: Drama as Cultural Perspective

This article affirms the view that literature transmits multiple reflections on human life that shape social mores. Examining stereotypes of age in literature as socially constructed artifacts reveals the prevailing attitudes toward aging during that time. This study focuses on the aging Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare\u27s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and in George Bernard Shaw\u27s Caesar and Cleopatra. Writing 300 years apart, these two great playwrights inscribe both positive and negative models of aging, reflecting views in their eras that persist today. This article identifies these models, then explores them from a Lacanian standpoint, showing that each dramatist focuses on Caesar\u27s ego development through the opinions of other characters. Offering a primarily negative view of aging, Shakespeare emphasizes the fragmented mirror images that other characters hold up to Caesar. Shaw self-consciously counters Shakespeare by foregrounding Caesar as subject, who beholds his aging self in the mirror of others\u27 opinions while enacting a positive model of aging. Tracing this long tradition of aging stereotypes found in the two plays can be useful as scholars continue to reconstruct society\u27s attitudes toward aging

War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare

War and Words is a sweeping study of the profound, painful, and most significantly, defining cultural moments. Working from Homer through to Hemingway and in all traditions, some of the nation\u27s best scholars of literature illustrate how literature and language affect not only the present but also future generations by shaping history even as they represent it. This powerful collection affirms that the humanities remain a site of the most profound reflection on human experience and historical events that have, for better and worse, shaped world civilization. War and Words offers students of literature critical tools for reading literary explorations of ambivalence toward war and provides teachers of literature a suggested syllabus for a course that has become all too necessary in a time when all our lives are touched by war.https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/casfaculty_books/1068/thumbnail.jp