scholarly journals Voicing One’s Will. Theatre as Audio-Visual Hypotyposis of the Poetic

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Groneberg
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Recent Proposal

This contribution invites the reader on a conceptual and imaginary journey through the relation between the visual and auditive dimensions of theatre. A reading of Ovid’s metamorphosis of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis will illustrate the general idea which I will then confront with the recent proposal of Denis Guénoun to conceive of theatre as the (visual) hypotyposis of poetry. Hegel and others will serve as the catalyst potion to allow for a union of the two lines of thought, leading to the conclusion that theatre is not only a visual but also an auditive hypotyposis of the poetic – in a wide sense, encompassing music and dance. The roots of theatre are often identified in Ancient Greek tragedy and comedy. In that context, a link between the terms “theatre” and “theory” has been observed via the verb theôrein (being spectator, behold) and its noun thea (view, spectacle). It might thus seem that theatre is first of all to be viewed, and that sound and listening are secondary. The following thoughts provide an additional view – if not a different understanding.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Eades
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Artistic Heritage

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.

The Vengeful Lioness in Greek Tragedy: A Posthumanist Perspective1

2018 ◽  
pp. 203-220
Author(s):  
Alessandra Abbattista
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Human Male ◽  
Female Hybrid

This chapter reinterprets the animal metaphors used in ancient Greek tragedy to describe revenging women from a posthumanist perspective. Whereas critics have commonly regarded such metaphors as indicating the female revenger’s inhuman savagery and otherness (whereby a woman’s attempt to assume a male heroic role transforms her instead into a monstrous beast), posthumanism challenges conventional distinctions between animal and human, male and female. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, it argues that female revengers similarly challenge these distinctions. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea into lionesses reveals their complex figuration as male-female hybrid beings, recalling the tragic suffering and protective violence of the Homeric lion within a new context of interfamilial conflicts. These transformations engender terror but also compassion, evoking new ways of conceptualising humans-as-animals that invite recognition of our own unstable and hybrid nature.

Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gourd
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Commit Suicide

As Septimus Smith prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window and ‘vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings,’ he comments on the narrative tradition of his own tragic demise. ‘It was their idea of tragedy,’ he reflects with bitter irony – ‘Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing.’ This paper addresses the wider implications of this sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by positioning Septimus’ death as the tragic climax and dramatic focus of the novel. Previous scholarship has failed to recognise the significance of this allusion to Greek tragedy, though Woolf was an accomplished classical scholar and a voracious reader of ancient literature. This detail would repay attention, as the author’s self-conscious engagement with the literary and intellectual tradition of tragedy, demonstrated through the narrative and suicide of Septimus Smith, impacts upon our understanding of the novel as a whole. It raises several important questions which this paper seeks to address: to what extent does Woolf intend for us to sympathise with Septimus as the tragic protagonist? How does Woolf’s appropriation and manipulation of the tragic genre reflect her views on war, mental illness, and her relationship with her doctors? And finally, what does it tell us about Woolf’s idea of tragedy, and what she considers to be tragic?

Greek Tragedy as a Window on the Dispossessed

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Wilmer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
Theatre Studies

In this article Steve Wilmer discusses adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight the plight of the displaced and the dispossessed, including Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York, Marina Carr's Hecuba, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen, which is notably emblematic among appropriations of ancient Greek plays in referencing the problems facing refugees in Europe. He considers how this latter play has been directed in a variety of ways in Germany and Austria since 2013, and how in turn it has been reappropriated for new dramatic performances to further investigate the conditions of refugees. Some of these productions have caused political controversy and one of them has even been physically attacked by a right-wing group. Steve Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-editor of ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016), and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He also edited a special issue of Nordic Theatre Studies in 2015 titled ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’.

New Playwriting, Ancient Greek Tragedy

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (39) ◽  
pp. 293-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nesta Jones
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek

scholarly journals Andronikos I Komnenos: A Greek Tragedy

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry J. MAGOULIAS
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Font Size ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
Classical Drama ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
The Aesthetic

<span style="line-height: 150%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: black; font-size: 12pt">The Annals of Niketas Choniates depict Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos (1183-1185) in certain aspects of his lifestyle as a mirror image of his first cousin, Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180). The life and death of Andronikos I Komnenos provide us with a window into the aesthetic, moral, intellectual, religious, economic and emotional world of Byzantine society in the 12th century. It was thanks to the Byzantine empire that the ancient texts were preserved and transmitted. Ancient Greek culture and reason, in particular, continued to inform Christian values while, at the same time, both could be in radical conflict. The tragic reign of Andronikos as presented by Niketas Choniates conforms to Aristotle's principles of classical drama, but there is a fundamental disagreement between the author of the Poetics and the historian as to what constitutes tragedy, which underlines this conflict.</span>

scholarly journals Cultural Encounters in Modern Productions of Greek Tragedy

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.E. Wilmer
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Local Population ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Homeless Persons ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
The Right

The exiled character in need of asylum is a recurrent theme in ancient Greek tragedy. In many of these plays, we see uprooted and homeless persons seeking sanctuary, and for the ancient Greeks, hospitality was an important issue. Many of these plays have been updated to comment on the current social and political conditions of refugees and often reflect on the notion of hospitality, something which both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida considered to be fundamental to ethics. Recently there has been a series of demonstrations and occupations of public spaces by asylum seekers that has gained considerable news coverage. In Austria a group of about sixty refugees (from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area) occupied the famous Votiv church in the middle of Vienna in 2012 and went on hunger strike. In Germany a large group of asylum seekers marched from various parts of the country to Berlin where they occupied the square at the Brandenburg Gate before being allowed to establish a tent community in Kreuzberg. In Hamburg a group of 80 asylum seekers who came to Germany via Lampedusa found refuge in St Pauli church, and it was there that Nicholas Stemann presented a first reading of Elfriede Jelinkek’s play Die Schutzbefohlenen in September 2013. More recently right-wing groups have mounted weekly marches through Dresden to call for a halt to immigration, and these have been contested by simultaneous counter-demonstrations in favour of immigrants and refugees. In this paper I will consider several adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight cultural encounters between the local population and those arriving from abroad who are looking for asylum. In particular I will examine Stemann’s production that has been running at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg since September 2014, and features asylum seekers from Lampedusa on stage who beg the audience for the right to remain in Germany.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document