WARNING, SOME SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR AT ALL WITH TWIN PEAKS Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). We will not recap that argument now you can read it here. When you do so, there is a lot of narrative meat to chew in the final two episodes, which seems to confirm our prior hypothesis that Twin Peaks is about Baby Boomer shame.

As with all things David Lynch, you have to appreciate the (weird) window-dressing but, nonetheless, ignore such affectations when it comes to explanations by focusing on the essential. Judging from the immediate response on Twitter and subsequent mainstream media recaps (with the exception of Dan Martin at The Guardian and a few others), many people seem perplexed about the open-ended finale of Twin Peaks: The Return. This Moreso article is a follow-up to an earlier one, “Generational Shame in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (28 June 2017), available here. I wish I could do it better justice.MORESO | Fire Walk with Me | David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Finale

You have raised an intriguing and penetrating question. Is 'Oedipus Tyrannos', then, a philosophical play and therefore philosophical literature? I should be inclined to say that it is, but the idea of philosophical literature is too soft-edged, insufficiently determinate, to decide the matter uncontroversially. Oedipus is shamed and morally contaminated by the mere fact that he has killed his father and married his mother even though neither act was done knowingly with intention. Dodds' distinction in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). For example, Sophocles' 'Oedipus Tyrannos' (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King) exactly illustrates a shame morality as opposed to a guilt morality, to use E.R. Secondly, the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides contain philosophical themes and ideas. These fragments are not literature in the sense in which, say, a Platonic dialogue is literature. There is no clear-cut decision procedure for whether, say, a number of related Heraclitian fragments amount to 'literature'. In the first place, a considerable amount of the pre-socratic philosophical material surives in fragments. This question is hard to answer for at least two reasons. from 6th century BC until the end of Roman rule in Greece.Īlso according to Wikipedia, Ancient Greek philosophy 'dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including astronomy, mathematics, political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, logic, biology, rhetoric and aesthetics.' I assume Wikipedia's definition of Ancient Greek philosophy, i.e. This leads me to the question, What percentage of extant Greek texts from Antiquity constitute philosophy? For the purpose of this question, (Sidenote: According to the article Über ägyptische Lexikographie by Carsten Peust ( Lingua Aegyptia, 7, 2000) Ancient Greek is the only language from Antiquity that has a bigger text corpus than Akkadian, which is roughly on a par with Latin.) Moreover, literature (when strictly defined as fiction) is a different genre than philosophy. (Scribes made conscious selections when deciding what to copy by hand and what not, whereas physical and chemical processes (and occasionally worms) make no distinction between the content of clay tablets.) However, the corpus of Greek texts from Antiquity that have come down to is has been researched over a much longer period of time and has been passed down under circumstances that are very different than those for clay tablets and other cuneiform texts. I recently asked on Literature Stack Exchange, What percentage of clay tablets found in Mesopotamia contain literature?Īnd was only able to define an upper limit 4% literature in the overall corpus texts from the Ancient Near East.

Oedipus the king sidenotes