This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian ‘contrary to expectation’ joke) contribute to the wider ...comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of ‘comic bit’, a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for.
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of ...oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism. These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.
A variety of ancient sources suggest that there was more than one Aristophanic play entitled Πλοῦτος, and the scholia on the extant Plutus show that one ancient commentator erroneously thought that ...he was working on a comedy of 408 BC when in reality he had the comedy of 388 BC in front of him. This error, which most likely arose because there were two similar versions of the late Plutus, has often been attributed to the first-century BC scholar Didymus Chalcenterus. It is here argued that the basis for this ascription is weak and that there are in fact substantial counter-arguments. Instead of Didymus, a later commentator such as the second-century AD scholar Symmachus may have been responsible for the mistake, which probably had more to do with the evolving transmission history of Aristophanes’ comedies than with careless scholarship.
This paper presents a re-reading of Aristophanes's comedy Ekklesiazusai (Assembly Women). It shows that this play exhibits the aporias of the binary gender order, which evolved in classical ...fifth-century Athens, along with other dualisms typical of the period, such as the opposition of pólis and oíkos. The paper argues that Aristophanes negotiates these dualisms against the background of changing epistemological conditions of the fifth century, i. e. the establishment of the "principle of bivalence". From the perspective of theater and literary history, this development made the chorus increasingly unrecognizable, since it was primarily a figure of non-binary (and also cosmological) relations. The chorus becomes newly legible today precisely where dualisms erode.
While the tragic chorus has drawn much attention and analysis, the comedic chorus has gone largely overlooked in the fields of classical philology, literary studies, philosophy, and theater studies. ...But the chorus of Greek comedy is distinct from that of tragedy. It is a kind of swarm. It lives on in the comical personage of later comedies, though these presumably have no chorus. The choruses oppose the unity of dramatic form, as is shown in particular by the parabasis. They introduce displacements that repeatedly disturb the representations demanded by the tragic form and usher in the performative events that take place between the chorus and the spectators (and listeners). As this article shows, choric elements are therefore hardly an outdated episode of theatrical presentation. Comical personages like Buffo and Pulcinella are not closed, individuated characters but theatrical figures that belong in a series. They come from a chorus without preexisting distinctions and boundaries-a chorus of those who do not belong, of indefinite heterogeneities.
In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the particle που in Attic drama. We argue that Attic που is a marker of indirect personal evidentiality; it marks, in other words, that the information ...expressed has been obtained by inference or presumption. Additionally, we hypothesize that που is a pragmatic, intersubjective particle serving to establish or maintain common ground between speaker and addressee. In particular, as a grounding and hedging device, it can convey information with caution, putting speaker and addressee on the same informational level in order not to offend the addressee. In Section 1 we offer a concise statement of our argument and discuss a number of linguistic phenomena relevant to our analysis, most notably evidentiality, common ground, hedging, and grammaticalization (Sections 1.1-1.4). Section 2 outlines our corpus-based methodology and analytical criteria. The body of our paper is devoted to a close linguistic analysis of our corpus (Section 3). Section 4 offers our main conclusions.
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