Female acts in Greek tragedy Foley, Helene P; Foley, Helene P
2001., 20090110, 2009, 2001, 2001-01-01, Letnik:
15
eBook
Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential ...social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece.
This book presents a collection of new studies on the political aspects of Aristophanes' comic plays, produced in Athens in the latter half of the 5th century BCE.
Ritual Irony is a critical study of four problematic later plays of Euripides: the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Phoenissae, the Heracles, and the Bacchae. Examining Euripides' representation of ...sacrificial ritual against the background of late fifth-century Athens, Helene P. Foley shows that each of these plays confronts directly the difficulty of making an archaic poetic tradition relevant to a democratic society. She explores the important mediating role played by choral poetry and ritual in the plays, asserting that Euripides' sacrificial metaphors and ritual performances link an anachronistic mythic ideal with a world dominated by "chance" or an incomprehensible divinity. Foley utilizes the ideas and methodology of contemporary literary theory and symbolic anthropology, addressing issues central to the emerging dialogue between the two fields. Her conclusions have important implications for the study of Greek tragedy as a whole and for our understanding of Euripides' tragic irony, his conception of religion, and the role of his choral odes. Assuming no specialized knowledge, Ritual Irony is aimed at all readers of Euripidean tragedy. It will prove particularly valuable to students and scholars of classics, comparative literature, and symbolic anthropology. ; Ritual Irony is a critical study of four problematic later plays of Euripides: the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Phoenissae, the Heracles, and the Bacchae. Examining Euripides' representation of sacrificial ritual against the background of late fifth-century Athens, Helene P. Foley shows that each of these plays confronts directly the difficulty of making an archaic poetic tradition relevant to a democratic society. She explores the important mediating role played by choral poetry and ritual in the plays, asserting that Euripides' sacrificial metaphors and ritual performances link an anachronistic mythic ideal with a world dominated by "chance" or an incomprehensible divinity. Foley utilizes the ideas and methodology of contemporary literary theory and symbolic anthropology, addressing issues central to the emerging dialogue between the two fields. Her conclusions have important implications for the study of Greek tragedy as a whole and for our understanding of Euripides' tragic irony, his conception of religion, and the role of his choral odes. Assuming no specialized knowledge, Ritual Irony is aimed at all readers of Euripidean tragedy. It will prove particularly valuable to students and scholars of classics, comparative literature, and symbolic anthropology.
Ritual Irony is a critical study of four problematic later plays of Euripides: the Iphigenia in Aulis , the Phoenissae , the Heracles , and the Bacchae . Examining Euripides' representation of ...sacrificial ritual against the background of late fifth-century Athens, Helene P. Foley shows that each of these plays confronts directly the difficulty of making an archaic poetic tradition relevant to a democratic society. She explores the important mediating role played by choral poetry and ritual in the plays, asserting that Euripides' sacrificial metaphors and ritual performances link an anachronistic mythic ideal with a world dominated by chance or an incomprehensible divinity. Foley utilizes the ideas and methodology of contemporary literary theory and symbolic anthropology, addressing issues central to the emerging dialogue between the two fields. Her conclusions have important implications for the study of Greek tragedy as a whole and for our understanding of Euripides' tragic irony, his conception of religion, and the role of his choral odes. Assuming no specialized knowledge, Ritual Irony is aimed at all readers of Euripidean tragedy. It will prove particularly valuable to students and scholars of classics, comparative literature, and symbolic anthropology.
This paper considers how and why the American playwright David Ives's 2010-2012 New York hit play Venus in Fur directed by Walter Bobbie borrowed the plot of Euripides' Bacchae to dramatize a new ...version of Leopold van Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz). The play gradually reveals that the actress auditioning for the part of its heroine, Vanda, is in fact the goddess herself, who arrives to challenge and punish the playwright/hero for refusing to comprehend her divinity/the nature of female sexuality. In Bacchae, Dionysus's divinity enables reversals of gender and power, hard-to-categorize blurring of genre boundaries, and an uncanny control of plot. As she transforms and directs the play, Vanda/Aphrodite's superhuman metatheatrical powers permit similar reversals to Venus in Fur, while challenging plots that traditionally link female liberation with (especially anti-male) violence and the female gender with a propensity for irrationality and uncontrolled desire. Through exploring and then reversing an initially stereotypical relation between male director and actress, the play exposes modern theater's own parallel agenda to reinforce traditional gender divisions.
This book explores the emergence of Greek tragedy on the American stage from the nineteenth century to the present. Despite the gap separating the world of classical Greece from our own, Greek ...tragedy has provided a fertile source for some of the most innovative American theater. Helene P. Foley shows how plays like Oedipus Rex and Medea have resonated deeply with contemporary concerns and controversies—over war, slavery, race, the status of women, religion, identity, and immigration. Although Greek tragedy was often initially embraced for its melodramatic possibilities, by the twentieth century it became a vehicle not only for major developments in the history of American theater and dance, but also for exploring critical tensions in American cultural and political life. Drawing on a wide range of sources—archival, video, interviews, and reviews—Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage provides the most comprehensive treatment of the subject available.
The Urgency of Tragedy Now Foley, Helene P; Howard, Jean E
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
10/2014, Letnik:
129, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In everyday and more specialized contexts, then, tragedy is a powerful term that can serve as a veil concealing difficult truths or as a lever of critique. If people turn to the literary realm and ...bracket off general understandings of the tragic from a more focused discussion of tragedy as a dramatic form, they wonder what they understand tragedy to be and what its properties and conditions of possibility are. For some critics, like George Steiner, tragedy is unthinkable in modernity. He argues that it cannot be meaningfully written now, its "death" heralded by modernity's loss of belief in the gods. Perhaps few now accept Steiner's views, but his work raises the question of whether tragedy is an invariant form and whether it requires certain conditions, like a belief in the transcendental, for its flourishing. Here, Foley and Howard discuss the urgency of tragedy now.
The HomericHymn to Demeter, composed in the late seventh or early sixth century B.C.E., is a key to understanding the psychological and religious world of ancient Greek women. The poem tells how ...Hades, lord of the underworld, abducted the goddess Persephone and how her grieving mother, Demeter, the goddess of grain, forced the gods to allow Persephone to return to her for part of each year. Helene Foley presents the Greek text and an annotated translation of this poem, together with selected essays that give the reader a rich understanding of theHymn's structure and artistry, its role in the religious life of the ancient world, and its meaning for the modern world.
