Searching for Oedipus - by Kenneth Glazer (Paperback)

About the Book

In Searching for Oedipus, attorney Ken Glazer recounts his decades-long quest to answer the Riddle of Oedipus: why Oedipus Rex, after 2,500 years, still wields such enormous power. Along the way he slices through the scholarly debate, laying bare the many ways this ancient mas...

Book Synopsis

In Searching for Oedipus, attorney Ken Glazer recounts his decades-long quest to answer the Riddle of Oedipus: why Oedipus Rex, after 2,500 years, still wields such enormous power. Along the way he slices through the scholarly debate, laying bare the many ways this ancient masterpiece still speaks to us today.

Review Quotes

Glazer takes each episode of the play in sequence and provides his reflections on it. He offers the general reader a good over-view of the plot, noteworthy scholarhship about the play and theories about the myth of Oepipus. Glazer helpfully summarizes the issues that have occasioned scholarly debate, with charts of both sides of the arguments, at the end of the book.

Written in a jaunty, down-to-earth style, ballasted by a solid grounding in the vast store of accumulated wisdom and scholarly commentary inspired by Sophocles' tragedy, Kenneth Glazer's Searching for Oedipus is at once the culmination of one man's lifelong quest to discover for himself the meanings of the classic story of the 'circular detective' and a valuable starting point for future investigators setting out on their own personal and intellectual journeys in Oedipus's swollen footsteps.

In this stunningly broad and creative book about the most brilliant and enigmatic Greek drama, Ken Glazer, a practicing lawyer, examines Oedipus the King from every angle--as a "circular detective" story, a study of self-ignorance and the power of the past, and an inquiry into the nature of fate, heroism, ethical choice, and tragedy itself. Intriguing parallels illuminate his intellectual journey, from Woody Allen, Nietzsche and Socrates to Hamlet, Harry Potter, and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Part autobiography, part masterful summation of centuries of scholarship and reception, this engagingly written quest is for anybody who ever wondered why the Oedipus story fascinates us, proving the truth of Glazer's observation: Sophocles play is too great to be left to specialists alone.

The classics have always been real and relevant, but they haven't always been in the front of people's minds. In Searching for Oedipus, Kenneth Glazer has performed the great service of showing, once more, how a really first-rate work from classical Athens still speaks to modern life. Glazer takes as his text the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, which was a personal favorite ever since his school years. He reviews how this play prodded and guided his growing understanding of the world. On first reading it showed the cleverness of Oedipus as he slowly figured out the mystery of his parentage (he had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother); on later readings it was seen to explore the nature of tragedy and unexpected turns of fortune; and most recently it has resonated for its deeply adult lessons about the importance of facing events with kindness and fortitude. Through all of these evolutions, both Sophocles and Glazer show us the continuing importance of the classic maxim, carved into the temple at Delphi, 'Know thyself.'

Though a professor of German literature, I began every one of my classes by assigning Oedipus Rex, because in many respects it is the bedrock work of Western literature. In Searching for Oedipus, Ken Glazer has done us all a favor by showing how and why Sophocles's masterpiece still matters 2500 years later. And Glazer does so in an appealingly personal way, describing his own evolving attempt to answer the Riddle of Oedipus--an evolution that in interesting ways parallels Oedipus's own riddle-solving journey. At the same time, he lays before us the spread of centuries of interpreters, including the distorting influence of Freud. A wonderful and fulfilling book.

About the Author

Kenneth Glazer has practiced law for many years after graduating from UC Berkeley, where he studied history and philosophy, and Stanford University Law School.