Greek Tragedy Research Articles

Ariadne's Theatre

Ariadne's Theatre Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment Robert Pfaller Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com 154 Pages; Print, $24.95 For two or more decades, participation in life in most forms has been touted as the highest value. Even our cultural play is dominated by simulations of warfare, adventure, and sex in online games, demanding participation to the maximum degree. In politics, we seek to get out the vote and bring more folks to the town-hall meeting, to the protest line, to the state, or to the national capitol. At work, everything is organized around the team of workers. In our classrooms, small groups, the reading and writing circles during and after classes, rule. We have self-help groups, exercise buddies, and meditation friends, all of which require participation. It is as if experimental theater's performance aesthetic has become the new norm for all social and cultural, and even political, activities. Rather than being spectators at this overactive life, we are its necessarily-engaged actors, directors, and life-coaches. Exhaustion is bound to set in. Or so it seems, at first, when reading about the new phenomenon of interpassivity, discussed so succinctly and memorably in this book. What is interpassivity? As the subtitle suggests, it is the delegation of our consumption of pleasure to other people or machines. Whereas in Hegel's famous master-slave dialectic, masters through history have delegated to their slaves (those they have conquered and not slaughtered) all the work of transforming a raw piece of nature into a finished object of culture (a commodity for use and sale), the dialectic of interpassivity shockingly entails the delegation of our consumption to others. And this is a new aesthetic, so it means it is itself somehow pleasurable: We now enjoy delegating to others our own enjoyment, as if the imperative to consume, like the imperative to work, is just too much for us—so we evade it, and this evasion or avoidance is itself a new, paradoxically ascetic pleasure. Both Pfaller and Zizek have done the most to conceptualize this new phenomenon and have both standard and ever-proliferating examples of it. The best example of interpassivity discussed in this book may be Lacan's proposal for the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy. As Pfaller summarizes from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1965), the chorus may have had "the function of a spectator present on stage" experiencing "compassion and fear…in place of the real spectators, who were relieved of this task." Similarly, he cites Zizek for commenting on this Lacanian proposal: The canned laugh tracks for situation comedies on TV are the modern mechanical version of the chorus. Pfaller continues, glossing Zizek: Here a certain mechanical laughter is always already built-in, erupting after every joke and before any possible laughter on the part of the spectator. Therefore these works of popular culture are not only that which is amusing but also that which is amused. The program laughs at itself. This zombie-like or robotic simulation of a spectator gives Pfaller, he believes, the key to the aesthetic subject per se. In extending this analysis from the contemporary phenomena of interpassivity to the substance of the aesthetic subject, Pfaller concludes: The basic pleasure of spectator therefore seems to be an interpassive one: it consists of creating and splitting off another character who serves as a backing for the illusions that one does not share but still finds great. Pleasure in art thus turns out to be a pleasure [not of edifying identification and internalization] but of [critical and projective] 'disidentification' [as the psychiatrist Octave Mannoni notes of patients], of splitting off imaginary spectators…Interpassivity thus appears to be the most general structure of aesthetic pleasure. Invisible observers and implicit readers, as well as imaginary narrators and implied authors, all participate in this dissociative process of disintegrating sensibility. In this highly ironic and paradoxical manner, the delegation of pleasure "is a necessary precondition for [any] aesthetic pleasure. A theory of interpassivity is therefore the key to a general aesthetic theory." An over-stuffed, conflicted self would thereby become the source and...

Tragedy's Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 by Erika Fischer-Lichte

118 BOOKREVIEWS intermediality. David H. Wenkel, in Coins as Cultural Texts in the World of the New Testament (2016), likewise ruminates on the hermeneutic potential of intertextuality for the study of coins as “cultural texts” (10-11), but “reading” ancient coins entails far more than intertextuality alone can explain. I would like to propose the term “nomismality” to describe the unique intersection of image and text on coins, along with the associated terms intranomismality and internomismality to describe the complex relationships between imperial and provincial coinage,as well as between individual coin series. JOHN JACOBS MontclairKimberleyAcademy,jjacobs@mka.org * * * * * Tragedy's Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800. By ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xix + 398. Hardcover, $115.00. ISBN 978-0-19965163 -4. Tragedy’s Endurance is not simply a welcome addition for the field of Classical Reception, but it is also a book which offers a new methodological paradigm to a thriving discipline. The book presents a new approach to theatre historiography by relating the performances of Greek tragedy to the formation of cultural identity in Germany (from Winkelmann’s idealist Philhellenism to contemporary deconstructionist approaches). Commencing from Goethe’s production of Euripides’ Ion (1802) in Weimar, which was guided by the principle of harmony between all the elements of the performance (music, picturesque sets and costumes), Fischer-Lichte calculates firmly the starting ideological point of her discussion. Consequently, beauty, harmony and Philhellenism epitomized the romantic idolization of Greek Antiquity, strengthening therebythe “institutionalization” of Bildung. Potsdam’s Antigone (1841) continued the cultural production of Greek tragedy performances as “unmissable sensation[s]” (45) at times when Philhellenism was linked with the emerging nationalism in Europe and Classics BOOKREVIEWS 119 were becoming the focus of the new university in Germany. The author rightly underlines that in this historical context a new Weltanschauung was born due to the prevalent phenomenon of historicism according to which a past epoch could be “understood on the basis of acknowledging its fundamental difference and foreignness” (50). Not surprisingly, the production of Antigone was the first in the German states strictly to follow the principles of historicism, particularly in the sense that the great and immortal qualities of the ancient texts were to be filteredandreturnedtorealitywithacontemporaryandalterableeffect(55). A new era began with Richard Wagner’s theorization of the Gesamtkunstwerk which “ultimately aim[ed] to realize a socio-political utopia” (74) for a people’s democratic assembly in theatre, developed in the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876. Using her favorite anthropological model of analysis (employed by Victor Turner), Fischer-Lichte interprets the Festival as a “liminal experience,” “characterized by the separation from everyday life” and causing thereby “the destabilization or affirmation of an individual’s identity but also towards the coming-into-being of acommunity” (83). At the beginning of the twentieth century Max Reinhardt inaugurated the era of the Director who must use the Classics in a way that complies with modern times. With his productions of Greek tragedies between 1903 and 1919, Reinhardt proved his awareness “of the tension between historicity and topicality” andhe developednewmethods and“modes that were stronglyrelated to contemporary life in the modern metropolis” (96). But what makes FischerLichte ’s analysis more significant is her theatrical sensitivity in concluding that Reinhardt employed theatrical “devices that directed the spectator’s attention to the performers’ bodies—to the individual bodies of the protagonists as well as to the masses of bodies in the case of the chorus and sometimes even to their own bodies” (96). Thus, a Nietzschean vision of an ecstatically “primitive” Greekness was chosen for Sophocles’ Electra (1903) not only to allude to ancient maenads, but to attract attention to the protagonist’s “phenomenal body” (100). Additionally, the “atmosphere” of “coming-into-being of a community exclusively through performance” (120) is an important remark that FischerLichte makes in discussing Reinhardt’s legendaryOresteia(1911–1912). A new step in the contemporary approach to staging Greek Tragedy was recognized in Leopold Jessner’s production of Oedipus (1929) that acknowledged ancient Greece as a model “albeit defined by everyone in their own way according to their artistic and political leanings and Weltanschauungen (141). 120 BOOKREVIEWS...

The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy: Gangs of Athens by Matthew Shipton

The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy: Gangs of Athens by Matthew Shipton

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages by Tanya Pollard

Reviewed by: Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages by Tanya Pollard Deborah Uman Tanya Pollard. Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii, 331. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-19-879311-3. In this clearly written and thoroughly researched book, Pollard argues that ancient Greek tragedies influenced sixteenth-century theater significantly more than previously thought. Pollard offers evidence of their availability and popularity during the early modern period and includes several useful appendices listing sixteenth-century editions of Greek plays in Greek, Latin and vernacular languages as well as performances of plays by or based on Greek playwrights. Pollard finds additional proof in the echoes of Greek tragic icons in a variety of sixteenth-century plays, which she analyzes to better understand the “complex process of literary transmission” and “an explicitly theatrical model for intertextual engagement” (3). Given the prominence of female protagonists in the Greek plays produced in the sixteenth century, Pollard characterizes the early modern understanding of the origins of drama as directly linked to Euripides’ eloquent women whose theatrical power stems from their ability to evoke sympathy from their internal and external audiences. While Hecuba remains the most prominent example, Pollard also examines figures such as Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Jocasta and Alcestis, highlighting the centrality of the mother-daughter dyad and uncovering the links between rhetorical power and women’s status as grieving mothers and sacrificial daughters. Pollard puts Shakespeare at the center of this book, framing the four chapters devoted to Shakespeare with an examination of early modern translations of Greek plays and a lively reading of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Chapter 1 focuses on Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneia and George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta. Noting the ways in which translators diverged from the source materials, Pollard finds that the plays display “a surprisingly consistent interest in the heroic powers of eloquent sacrificial virgins mobilized by the affective intensity of their grieving mothers” (71). Although English tragedy shifted to focus on male suffering, Pollard contends that Greek women haunt Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as well as Titus Andronicus, which, Pollard suggests, Shakespeare co-wrote with George Peele, who was more familiar with Greek sources. She also speculates that this collaboration may have “left a Euripidean imprint” on Shakespeare’s tragic imagination (121), leading to the preoccupation with Hecuba that surfaces in Hamlet. Despite its shift to a mourning son who monopolizes the stage, Hamlet’s fascination with Hecuba suggests an acknowledgment of her affective power that Shakespeare hopes to achieve in his own work. The chapters devoted to Shakespeare feature some of Pollard’s most attentive and compelling close reading. For instance, in addressing Shakespeare’s appropriation of Greek tragic women for comic aims, Pollard offers a dazzling explanation of The Comedy of Error’s frequent use of the word “burden” and other etymologically related terms to evoke the tragic potential of paternity that belies the play’s title and tone. Pollard reads The Comedy of Errors alongside Twelfth Night as Shakespeare’s unique form of hybrid comedy, a form that engages with elements of Greek tragedy and highlights women’s ability to elicit sympathy. Next, Pollard groups together Much Ado about Nothing, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, which all stage a woman’s seeming return from death and can be linked to Euripides’ Alcestis, whose titular heroine represents “the hybrid [End Page 743] possibilities of tragicomic redemption” associated particularly with maternity (173). This chapter is particularly thought-provoking, presenting Alcestis as a model of virtue not linked to vengeance and interpreting The Winter’s Tale’s oracle as “a model for a distinctively female embodied, and poetic form of creative reproduction” (191). Pollard reads Shakespeare’s revived heroines as bold and eloquent in contrast to the silenced Alcestis, offering a perhaps overly optimistic interpretation of each woman’s agency while underplaying the plays’ act of patriarchal violence. Nevertheless, her understanding of the value of female suffering offers useful insight into these dark and often troubling plays. Arguing that Shakespeare’s plays are a “bridge between the theater’s Greek origins and new approaches for engaging audiences’ sympathies” (221), Pollard concludes with a delightfully layered analysis...

(Nie)typowa rola tłumacza starożytnych tekstów dramatycznych

(Non)typical Role of the Ancient Greek Tragedies’ Translator Ancient Greek tragedies were written by their authors to be performed on the Athenian stage and the shape of this stage with its technical devices was included in characters’ lines. However, there is a fundamental difference between the stage those plays were written for and the modern stage on which any drama translation may potentially be realized. The time span too poses a great difficulty for a translator as those plays belong to a culture we probably cannot truly access any more. According to Jerzy Ziomek, every text from the past needs to be adapted nowadays. But does it mean that a translator of any ancient drama aware that those plays were written to be performed on stage, can for various reasons, whether literary or theatrical, take on the role not only of the first reader, but also of the first producer of a given play, thus adapting it to the modern theatre stage?

Eti zōsa phlox: Inferring Divine Presence in Euripides’ Bacchae

It has long been recognised by interpreters that Dionysus’ meanings are peculiarly connected with his presence (parousia). Myths of the god typically recount a divine presence undiscerned or misdiagnosed by mortals, with tragic consequences. The vengeful Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae comes amongst humans disguised, ironically, to make them learn and recognise his divine identity and that they are in the presence of the truly, if not at first apparently, immortal. The kind of inference that it seems mortals are expected to rely upon in the vicinity of Dionysus in order to secure that all-important knowledge and recognition, is explored in this paper, which is offered as a contribution towards the development of a contemporary anthropology of Greek tragedy and its god. The anthropology of art and agency of Alfred Gell is mobilised in order to explore how different modes of inference are implicitly compared and evaluated in the drama and to suggest what this has to do with the nature of Dionysiac experience as represented by the tragic poet. The inspired inference it requires, envisioned by Euripides at the end of the 5th century, is equated with the logical process of abduction as defined and employed in philosophy, semiotics and the anthropology of art.

Dealing with Ambiguity: Johan Maurits, Black Pete and the the Crisis of Dutch Identity

textabstractA dominant way in which the Dutch think of themselves entails the image of an enlightened nation, too small to be really significant in world politics but nevertheless important as an ethical guiding light for other nations. In a globalizing world, that self- congratulatory image has recently been severely challenged, with public debate being dominated by the opposing sides of those who one-sidedly debunk Dutch culture and politics as oppressive and violent and others who persist in the myth of innocent bystandership and enlightened progressivism. Many scholars and publicists have called for a more nuanced discussion, typically emphasizing the ‘grey middle ground’ in between black and white opposites. This paper starts out by providing short accounts of Johan Maurits’s governorship of Dutch Brazil (1637-1644) and the stereotyped persona of Black Pete (one of the central figures of an annual children’s festival) as two topics of recent heated debate. Subsequently, it proposes an alternative way out of the current Dutch identity crisis while drawing on what may come as a surprising source: ancient Greek tragedy.

Introduction

Introduction issn 0362-4021 © 2018 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring 2018 7 Our first issue of Volume 42 contains our usual array of content. Christine Schmidt addresses the question of how to deal with racial prejudice and attitudes in group. Jeyda Ibrahim and Jo Allen present a way of working with bipolar patients in group, and Nina Brown discusses how to deliver comments about group process. In the Commentary section, Natalie Haziza discusses her early experience coleading a bereavement group in a clinic setting, Robert S. Pepper addresses the need for trainees to feel safe in supervision, and Jeffrey Roth addresses some complications of dual relationships. We have a large number of book reviews in this issue that have been held for lack of space. Fran Weiss reviews Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Comprehensive Handbook, 3rd ed., edited by Kelly D. Brownell and B. Timothy Walsh; Stephanie Lemor reviews Group Analysis in the Land of Milk and Honey, edited by Robi Friedman and Yael Doron; and Clare Amari reviews Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, by Bryan Doerries. Silvia Fiammenghi reviews Family and Couple Psychoanalysis: A Global Per­ spective, by David E. Scharff and Elizabeth Palacios; Jennelle Liljestrand reviews The Forgotten Children of Globalization: Psychosocial Consequences of Migration by Elisabeth Rohr, Mechtild M. Jansen, and Jamila Adamou; and finally, Michael McCutcheon reviews The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups, and Societies: Vol. 1. Mainly Theory, edited by Earl Hopper and Haim Weinberg. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback. —Lee Kassan, Editor ...

Syrian Theatre in Berlin

Syrian Theatre in Berlin Margaret Litvin Against a background of civil war, anger, and loss back home, how are Syrian theatre-makers in today’s Berlin navigating their new artistic and political landscape in order to make theatre, make a living, and perhaps eventually make a difference? My 2018 ATHE paper asked this question against its own background of raw and vivid loss. Our “Arab Theatre after the 2011 Uprisings” panel—comprising Ted Ziter and me, with Charlotte Canning as respondent—was inspired and instigated by our dear friend Hazem Azmy. Hazem was a beloved professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo and one of the most prominent and intellectually honest Egyptian theatre critics of his generation. He loved Boston, having first visited for an ASTR conference ten years earlier, when he arrived on the very night in 2008 that Barack Obama was elected president. Now, in 2018, we were both amazed at all the heartache and the thousand shocks that both our countries had suffered in just ten years. By temperament and training Hazem, was a dialectical optimist—he liked to resist despair, quoting Orson Welles’s saying that “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” His paper was to analyze a recent Egyptian adaptation of Inherit the Wind that won Best Performance at the National Theatre Festival in 2014, and its subsequent revivals: Did the play dramatize the battle between righteous reason and dull conformity, or between an arrogant intelligentsia and a threatened society? This was his way: to turn a text and performance over and over through different historical moments, watching it change meanings as different facets caught the light. But it was not to be. Three weeks before he was to come to Boston, Hazem died suddenly of an apparent heart attack in Belgrade, at the International Federation for Theatre Research conference, on July 10. He was just 49 years old. In the Egyptian theatre community, Hazem’s death is not a singular grief, but a tragedy upon tragedies. In September 2005, a theatre fire in Bani Suef killed forty-six theatre-festival participants, including the entire jury, wiping out an entire cohort of critics and directors with one blow. In 2017, prominent and beautiful-souled critic Nehad Selaiha, godmother to Egypt’s avant-garde theatre movement, died at age 72. My own mentor, Egyptian theatre critic and award-winning translator Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa, died five years ago at 70. Egyptian theatre practitioners live with censorship and untimely death as a constant companion. ________ The divergent strategies of two recent plays in Berlin—the first by Mohammad al-Attar and Omar Abusaada at the Volksbühne, the second by Ayham Majid Agha at the Gorki Theatre—challenge us to theorize what the work of Syrian theatre artists in Europe can say at this moment, and to whom. Unlike some more typical cases of post-9/11 “Arab/ic theatre for Western audiences,”1 Berlin audiences are diverse, comprising [End Page 447] viewers with different language skills and expectations, including some who are Arab immigrants themselves or know Syria or other Arabic-speaking societies intimately, along with others who do not but want their play-going to be timely. Yet, the Syrian-German arts community is relatively new, compared for instance to the generations-old Turkish-German arts community and the “post-migrant” theatre it has created.2 The Berlin-based Syrian artists do not fit neatly into the “Sindbad vs. Houdini” typology that Johanna Sellman and I recently proposed within another European context;3 they are neither exotic visitors on tour nor Arab Germans. Iphigenia, a devised play by Mohammad al-Attar (b.1980) and Omar Abusaada (b.1977), is the third in a trilogy of Greek tragedy offshoots with nonprofessional, refugee Syrian female performers directed by Abusaada, the last two written with playwright al-Attar.4 Originally meant for Lesbos, Greece, it ran into logistical problems (the asylum-seeking participants there could not yet legally work in Europe) and moved to Germany, losing its resonance with the specific precarity of many Syrian refugees’ lives in Turkey and then in Greece: in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis...

Dealing With Ambiguity: Johan Maurits, Black Pete and the Crisis of Dutch Identity

A dominant way in which the Dutch think of themselves entails the image of an enlightened nation, too small to be really significant in world politics but nevertheless important as an ethical guiding light for other nations. In a globalizing world, that self-congratulatory image has recently been severely challenged, with public debate being dominated by the opposing sides of those who one-sidedly debunk Dutch culture and politics as oppressive and violent and others who persist in the myth of innocent bystander-ship and enlightened progressivism. Many scholars and publicists have called for a more nuanced discussion, typically emphasizing the ‘grey middle ground’ in between black and white opposites. This paper starts out by providing short accounts of Johan Maurits’ governorship of Dutch Brazil (1637-1644) and the stereotyped persona of Black Pete (one of the central figures of an annual children’s festival) as two topics of recent heated debate. Subsequently, it proposes an alternative way out of the current Dutch identity crisis while drawing on what may come as a surprising source: ancient Greek tragedy.

Bóstwa i demony kobiece w tragedii greckiej

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Opera – Oratorio Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky and the Greek Original (SPhP XI, 1996)

This article is a voice in the discussion on the methods of stage implementation of Greek tragedy. The discussed staging of “Oedipus Rex” opera by Stravinsky (Tokyo ‚94) is dominated by non-verbal means of expression (music, set design, costume, stage movement), thus setting a supporting role for the libretto. Nevertheless, the performance arouses similar feelings and emotions as Sophocles’ drama.

Entre la realidad y la ficción, la razón y la locura: el drama coral como terapia individual y social

Desde la función política de la tragedia griega, las diferentes formas dramáticas occidentales han asumido de manera más o menos explícita unas funciones del espectáculo dramático que integran bajo distintas acepciones la pretendida kátharsis aristotélica, en ocasiones para rechazarla y evitarla, que incluso van más allá del prodesse et delectare horaciano, tendiendo hacia una función terapéutica individual y social en unas formas dramáticas de elevado trasfondo coral en las que los límites entre realidad y ficción, entre cordura y locura se difuminan hasta llegar a confundirse, en las que la llamada “cuarta pared” deja de existir. El objeto de este trabajo es realizar un breve recorrido por esa realidad dramática que conecta con los orígenes mismos del drama occidental a través de formas festivas carnavalescas y se proyecta a las más avanzadas vanguardias artísticas, pues en ellas se combina texto dramático, canto, música y danza en un todo que es la obra de arte.

Sophocles' Antigone. By DouglasCairns. Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. viii + 244. $29.95.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 43, Issue 4 p. 395-395 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Greece, Rome, Greco-Roman Period Sophocles' Antigone. By Douglas Cairns. Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. viii + 244. $29.95. Jocelyn R. Moore, Jocelyn R. Moore University of VirginiaSearch for more papers by this author Jocelyn R. Moore, Jocelyn R. Moore University of VirginiaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 December 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.13228Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume43, Issue4Special Issue: Oxford Handbook Series—Works in Religious Studies (Part 1)December 2017Pages 395-395 RelatedInformation

Odysseus in the Greek tragedies and the Athenians

Odysseus in the Greek tragedies and the Athenians

Euripides – Dramatic Concept, Innovation and Style

Abstract We can say that the Europidian Greek tragedy situated at the outset man to extreme limits, on the border where the divine begins. Any tragedy signifies and stimulates the energy of the hero to surpass himself through an incredible act of courage, to give a new measure of his greatness in the face of obstacles, to the unknown he meets in the world and in the society of his time. The tragedy shows us that in the very fact of human existence there is a challenge, or a paradox, it tells us that sometimes the aspirations of man come into conflict with the forces of the unexplained and destructive, which is beyond and yet very close to us. The poet and philosopher Euripides turns out to be a great humanist, he loves and sympathizes with the people, suggesting that by birth we are all equal.

Resignação como efeito trágico: a teoria schopenhaueriana da tragédia

A fim de aclarar a conjunção entre o trágico e a resignação, em primeiro lugar será apresentado o significado da resignação como consequência do trágico a partir da comparação com o sublime dinâmico. Posteriormente será explorada brevemente a contraposição entre a tragédia antiga e moderna, momento em que também será considerada a acusação de Nietzsche segundo a qual Schopenhauer não teria percebido a dimensão afirmativa da tragédia grega.

Tragico e tragedia: antichi conflitti e nuove sopravvivenze

The essay starts from the need to underline the profound irreconcilability existing in modern times between the terms of tragedy and tragic: two terms that, unlike what happened in the Greek tragedy, promptly revealed a profound divergence over the course of time. The conflict between opposing principles, but also deeply interwoven with each other, personified in the Birth of the tragedy of Nietzsche by Apollo and Dionysius, is present only in Greek tragedy. With the advent of Christianity - according to Hegel's interpretation in his youthful writings - precisely the figure of Christ bears witness, in the suffering required to bring his message of salvation, to the greatest tragedy. After this decisive event there will be no more room for the tragedy considered in its classical form. The tragic spirit will survive, with increasing vigor, in completely secularized genres: first of all, the novel.

The Myth of Ulysses in the Postwar Novel: Tragic and Anti-tragic mode in Stefano D’Arrigo and Walter Jens

In Twentieth Century’s Literature, the various declinations and rewritings of the Odysseus’ theme were conducted both in the tragic and the anti-tragic mode: the latter involving often, but not necessarily, the use of narrative strategies of parody. Referring to Hans Blumenberg (1979), we can speak of a constant “work on myth” that goes hand in hand with the development of postmodern poetics and elaboration of history, characterized by different narrative styles and strategies depending on the literary and cultural context in which they are inserted. Starting from one of the main theories about literary rewriting, as well as about mythopoetic and mythocritical discourse in twentieth century, this article aims to examine in a comparative perspective two novels, conceived almost at the same time in the Fifties, even if published separated by a distance of years. This is the Mediterranean novel Hocynus Orca (1975), by the Sicilian Stefano D'Arrigo, and Das Testament des Odysseus (1957), by the German writer Walter Jens, who is also known for his theoretical work on Greek mythology and tragedy. In these novels both authors choose the odyssean hypotext for liaising with the difficult legacy of World War II, but also to express its positioning in the contemporary world. The need to complete (Blumenberg) the myth of Ulysses thus produces in D'Arrigo a reinterpretation of the novel in the epic and tragic way, while Jens escapes to the anti-tragic modus offering to its anti-hero a secondary way out from his own myth.

Edipo re e Hamlet: una discesa ai padri

My contribution aims to highlight some relationships between Sophocles and Shakespeare starting from the main hypothesis regarding the circulation of the ancient Greek tragedy in the sixteenth-century Europe, and looking at the Freudian thesis. The analysis does not concerns single mythological figures, but involves the relationships between different symbols and characters: Oedipus, for example, may be seen not only behind the rich palimpsest of Hamlet, as has been widely shown, but also throughout King Lear’s complex plot and symbology. At the same time, Electra and Antigone could be considered as important patterns for understanding the notion of conflict in Hamlet. Accordingly, I would like to show that Shakespeare turns to Greek tragic models (and especially to Sophocles), in a sort of descent to fathers, in order to investigate and represent power in its abysmal – both familiar and individual – relationships.