THE FINAL TWO CHAPTERS OF THIS STUDY form a single thematic sequence, the focus of which is the relation of the gendered author to the inherited literary and cultural tradition. This chapter looks at two works that revisit and revise mythical figures from the Western cultural tradition from a contemporary perspective: Heiner Müller's 1977 performance text Die Hamletmaschine (The Hamletmachine) and Christa Wolf's 1983 prose narrative Kassandra (Cassandra). Müller's treatment of Hamlet, as the type of the introspective male intellectual subject, represents in extreme form the crisis in masculine subjectivity and authorship in the post-1945 period that has been one of the central focuses of this book, and the text concludes in a vision of apocalyptic destruction. Wolf's fictional occupation of the role of Kassandra, a figure derived from the Homeric account of the Trojan war, is, by contrast, the attempt to project a model of female subjectivity and authorship with which to counter the violence and destructiveness perceived as inherent in the Western cultural tradition. Yet Wolf's text likewise ends in death. Both texts take, in their respective ways, a fundamentally pessimistic view of the individual subject's possibilities for historical agency, an issue central to the readings presented here. The study concludes in chapter 8 with a reading of a work by Barbara Köhler, a writer from a younger generation: a poem cycle that was written in part as a response to Müller's Hamletmaschine and that, I shall argue, succeeds in generating a movement beyond the aporias of both Müller's and Wolf's texts to open up a new perspective on the conceptualization of gendered subjectivity within the modern Western tradition.