Oedipus Tyrannos Research Articles

Jocasta’s last hours: identity, responsibility, and violence in Martha Graham’sNight Journey

AbstractThis paper analyses Martha Graham’s Night Journey in relation to its primary model, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. Night Journey captivates us by drawing deeply on Sophocles’ original and invites us to turn our focus to the last hours of Jocasta’s life, a moment to which Sophocles’ play gives comparatively little attention. I argue that Graham’s focus on the last hours of Jocasta’s life brings fresh illumination to our interpretation of the Oedipus myth. I first discuss the dance’s narrative technique and then analyse three themes that are central to both Sophocles’ and Graham’s works: questions of identity; responsibility; and the deep-seated human urge toward violence in the face of anxiety. In each case I show how Graham transforms Sophocles’ treatment of these themes and explores them through the character of Jocasta and a chorus of women, making women the focus of the narrative’s meditations on the nature of identity, moral responsibility, and human emotion.

Tragedy and Juridical Forms

Foucault returned to the text of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos at various critical junctures in his thought. This article homes in on the place of that tragedy in the passage from the analytic of knowledge-power to the problematization of government by truth that took place around 1980, namely in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures. Particular attention is placed on the delineation of the political meaning of “alethurgy,” a neologism through which Foucault sought to thematize the significance of practices concerned with the manifestation of truth for the exercise of political power. By drawing on historical and anthropological studies of Greek “pre-law,” Foucault was able to explore the juridical dimensions of the liturgy of truth, especially in the transition from the Homeric centrality of the agon to the emergence of the forensic inquiry with its reliance on the extraction of (slave) testimony. The reading of tragedy here doubles as a nuanced critique of the juridical production of truth, one with important connections to Foucault’s contemporaneous political efforts to support practices of legal defense that rejected the demand that the crimi nalized subject reveal himself in an “auto-alethurgy.”

In the Wake of a Great Edition: Textual Notes on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos

In our second article (for the previous one see SO 92, 2018, 57–64) we discuss the following textual issues in Oedipus Tyrannos: I. 31–34 we are in favour of Johnson’s and Musgrave’s ἰσούμενοί σ᾽. – II. 73–74 a grammatical analysis is applied to make the construction clear. – III. 360 we propose ἢ ’κπειρᾷ πλέον; – IV. 640 our solution is ⟨τάδε⟩ δυοῖν [ἀπο]κρίνας κακοῖν. – V. 1494 we suggest τοῖς ἴσα instead of τοῖς †ἐμοῖς†.

FROM SEXUALITY TO GOVERNMENTALITY: THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX OF MICHEL FOUCAULT

The figure of Oedipus haunted the thought of Michel Foucault from the outset of his tenure at the Collège de France, in association with several key philosophical and historical projects, and enduring until the conclusion of his career. However, it was with Foucault's account of an “Oedipus complex”—one that operated “not at the individual level but at the collective level; not in connection with desire and the unconscious but in connection with power and knowledge” (“Truth and Juridical Forms,” 1973)—that Foucault was able to enlist Oedipus for a genealogy of “sexuality” and, furthermore, of “governmentality,” such as would increasingly preoccupy him through the mid- to late 1970s. Foucault's attention to classical texts—in particular the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles and the Republic of Plato—thereby helped to clear a critical pathway through the conventional Marxism embraced by the “repressive hypothesis,” and to arrive at a Nietzschean genealogy of sexuality and power.

Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse

Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse J. MICHAEL WALTON Until comparatively recently it was unusual to treat the comedy and tragedy of classical Athens as part of a single dramatic tradition. As for the satyr play as a significant part of a tragic submission, most early books on tragedy tended to find it an uncomfortable coda but, as only Euripides’ Cyclops survived complete from the whole canon, it could be simply sidelined like a rather dodgy uncle with a penchant for dandling nephews and nieces on his knee. The first major translator of Euripides, Robert Potter, omitted Cyclops entirely (1781 and 1783). Michael Wodhull, whose complete Euripides (1782) was sandwiched between the two Potter volumes, did include Cyclops, with no more than a footnote in apology for the language of Polyphemus as “extremely natural in the mouth of a drunken man,” but when it comes to the Cyclops’ plans for Silenus adds, “It appeared expedient to me to omit a line and a half at the close of this speech.” Charlotte Lennox, whose three-volume translation of Père Pierre Brumoy’s Théatre (sic) des Grecs (1759) initially dismissed Cyclops as “repugnant to our modes of thinking,” extended this discomfiture to the whole of Aristophanes. Her “Dissertation on Greek Comedy” begins with the confession that “I was in doubt a long time, whether I should meddle at all with Greek comedy,” mostly because “the licentiousness of Aristophanes, their author, is exorbitant.” Lennox chose to farm out translation of acceptable sections to other (and male) hands, though these are carefully bowdlerized to avoid frightStephanie Nelson, Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse: Comedy, Tragedy and the Polis in 5th Century Athens, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016, 394 pages. arion 24.2 fall 2016 ening the squeamish. Charles Wheelwright, who claimed to be the first to translate the whole of Aristophanes, still declared that: “The Lysistrata bears so evil a character that we must make but fugitive mention of it, like persons passing over hot coals.” Nonetheless, he managed in this “complete” translation to pepper the text with asterisks and own up to eighty expurgated lines before omitting everything from lines 810 to 1215. All of which goes towards accounting for the subsequent tendency, with some notable exceptions, to treat tragedy and comedy as separate entities well into the twentieth century, with Lysistrata still banned on the English stage until 1957. But, as Stephanie Nelson cogently argues in her introduction to this important study, “when the first comic performances were staged at the City Dionysia, comedy and tragedy shared the same stage in fifth-century BCE Athens and were performed at the same festivals” (1). Integration of Athenian dramatic forms could profitably be further investigated in terms of gender, theatricality, performance aspects, social conditions, family commitment, theology, morality, the generation gap, all in Aristophanes as well as in those of the three tragedians. Though Nelson has chosen to concentrate, as her subtitle signals, on the polis in the years between the first extant Aeschylus and the plays of 405–404, she does in the course of her study, approach most of these other topics at least peripherally. All of which make her volume most welcome, though with some reservations. Nelson’s organization of her main material is clear and precise. She offers a general Introduction on the background to her book, the linked but central differences between tragedy and comedy. Here she reveals she has a thesis or, as she later puts it: “As I argue throughout, tragedy often concerns itself with necessity and comedy with freedom. The roots of this distinction may also lie in the genres’ different origins” (31). In her opening two chapters she considers some performance aspects of both in Athens, then the satyr play, with Euripides’ Cyclops and fragments from elsewhere. In five further chapters she proceeds to specific aspects of her aristophanes and his tragic muse 150 main argument about tragedy and comedy through comparisons of individual plays from each genre: Acharnians, and the Oresteia and Bacchae; Wasps, and Ajax and Medea; Oedipus Tyrannos and Knights; Persians, Peace, and Birds; and a final chapter dealing with Aristophanes’ own attitude to tragedy in Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs...

The Complex Relation of Self-determination to Destiny in Oedipus Tyrannos

<p>Oedipus Rex, one of the three famed Theban tragedies by the Greek dramatist Sophocles, vividly portrays the complex and often troubling theme of humanity’s relationship to fate. By detailing the way in which Oedipus, king of Thebes, is reduced by the cruelty of predestination into a puppet with no semblance of control over the course of his own life, Sophocles seems to cast doubt on, not only the effectiveness, but also the meaning of self-control. Thus, freedom of choice, humanity’s final assertion of independence, appears to dissolve into hollow mockery. But even then, Sophocles confirms the fundamental significance of the self-knowledge and dignity that comes from struggling against tyrannical destiny. It is this dignity that sustains king Oedipus through his terrible ordeal so that he comes out of it tortured but not destroyed. It is also this elevation that adds to a tale of endless victimization a whole new dimension of complexity and imbues the words with a touch of tragic and transfiguring sublimity.</p>

Knowing and Not Knowing: Lost Innocence in Oedipus Tyrannos

Oedipus Tyrannos (Sophocles, 430 BCE) is examined psychoanalytically considering the elements of the story as unfolding in such a way as to leave what Freud (1905) called, “gaps unfilled and riddles unanswered” in the history, that is to say, devoid of a truly complex portrayal of human motivation and feeling. The quality of innocence that is dependent on simultaneously knowing and not knowing, both external reality and the internal realities that accompany it, is lost during Oedipus’ zealous investigation. Elements of the history, as Sophocles presents it, reveal gaps and riddles that become resolved as the play moves inexorably to its tragic conclusion, with the identification of Oedipus as the parricidal polluter. The solicitations of supernatural consultation from the Delphian oracle betoken a disowned knowing of a frightening or a shameful aspect of human nature without actually acknowledging that knowledge. As the investigation proceeds, the play devolves virtually into a play within a play with Oedipus, Jocasta, and Creon set apart from the chorus in such a way that highlights the exposure of Oedipus and Jocasta in their states of fulminant and unbearable public shame. It is in response to this exposure and shame that Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus blinds himself and requests banishment. The hitherto circumstantial history of unknowing parricide and incest powerfully affects the audience because those polluting crimes contain something essential, albeit disowned, in human nature. The quality of innocence, simultaneous knowing and not knowing, lost in Oedipus and Jocasta as the action moves relentlessly toward their tragic downfall and public exposure, allows the theater audience to persist in innocence, in states of knowing and not knowing by their vicarious, unseen, and unexposed participation in the performance. In Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles, 406 BCE), Oedipus is revered as well as reviled. This revulsion stems from the fact that he knows something about the inner recesses of the personality within the nuclear family that very much affects his effectiveness and greatness in the larger political order. He is somehow great and effective because of this linkage of the intrafamilial past with the political present. This is a crucial linkage often ignored in classical criticism. He is great because people know and do not know that he has lost innocence about the inner world of his family. Similarities to the psychoanalytic encounter are discussed.

Tyrannie et royauté dans l'Œdipe à Colone de Sophocle

In Sophocles'Œdipus at Coionus the staging of Theseus the basileus of Athens contrasts him with Creon, Eteocles and Polynices, who, with hybris, are in charge of, or are looking for, a tyrannical power at Thebes. This is in agreement with the transmitted text of Oedipus Tyrannos 873 (Ὑβρις φντενει τὐραννον) and allows a more precise understanding of Oedipus'' transformation from OT to OC.

Reflections on religion, the divine, and the Constitution

Preface Part One 1. Euripides on the Use and Abuse of Revelation in the Service of the Political Order 2. The Divine, an Unsettling Duality, and the Conduct of One's Life: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos Revisited 3. On Aristophanes' Clouds 4. Socrates' Dangerous Piety 5. Plato on the Divine in Human Affairs 6. Maimonides and Others on Faith, Philosophy, and Governing Principles 7. Conscience and Citizenship 8. El Greco and His Successors 9. Miguel de Cervantes on Death, the Divine, and the Proper Ordering of Human Affairs 10. Thomas Hobbes on Church and State 11. John Milton's Paradise Epics and the Divinely-Ordained Redemption of the Human Race 12. Challenges Posed by the Aztecs 13. The Holocaust and the Divine Ordering of Human Affairs ii. Part Two 1. Nature and the Divine in the Declaration of Independence 2. Benedict Arnold, Providence, and the Fates of Citizens and of Nations 3. Benjamin Franklin and the Workings of the Divine - At Least in America 4. the Year of [What] Lord? 5. Political Symbols and the Sacred in the United States 6. Thomas Jefferson and Religious Liberty 7. Abraham Lincoln and the Almighty 8. Presidential Invocations of the Divine 9. Presidential Farewell Addresses 10. Revelation, Human Understanding, and the Ordering of the Good Life: The Mormon Movement 11. Revelation and the Use of the United States Postal System: The I Am Movement 12. An Earth Elsewhere? 13. Yearnings for the Divine and the Natural Animation of Matter A. The Declaration of Independence (1776) Appendices A, B, and C should be taken from Reflections on Slavery and the B. The United States Constitution (1787) C. The Amendments to the United States Constitution (1791-1992) D. On the Destiny of the Jews in Eastern Europe (1939-1945) D (1) God, Please Choose Somebody Else (2000) D (2) In Eastern Europe, Anti-Semitism Is a Kind of Religion (2000) E. Martin E. Marty, George Anastaplo on the Christian Heritage (2010) F. George Anastaplo, On the Human Soul and Eternity (2010) G. Christopher A. Colmo, George Anastaplo's Appeal to Nature (2012) H. George Anastaplo, Reflections upon Any Trial for Impiety Not Only of Socrates But Also of Us (2013) I. George Anastaplo, Life and Death in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (2013) J. Harry V. Jaffa, Foreword for George Anastaplo's Further Thoughts on Abraham Lincoln: Discourse on Chance and Public Life (2013) K. Roger H. Hildebrand, On the Use by Physicists of Life-like Words (2013) L. John Van Doren, Silence at Delphi (2013) M. Roster of Cases Drawn On About the Author

THE SOBERING UP OF OEDIPUS levinas and the trauma of responsibility

Levinas's work persistently challenges the claim that the sovereignty of the ego is the foundation for ethics, a claim he attributes to the Greek philosophical tradition. This claim emerges in dominant accounts of responsibility, in which the agent's intentions define his or her culpability. However, in Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles also attempts to undermine this strict pairing of responsibility and deliberate choice. Oedipus undergoes a fundamentally Levinasian narrative arc by moving from self-assured sovereignty, based on his ability to comprehend the world, to an awakening to responsibility. In this essay I examine the points of intersection and divergence between the tragic narrative of Oedipus and the traumatic subject in Levinas's work.

Sightlines: The ‘limits of illusion’ in <i>Oedipus Tyrannos</i> and <i>King Lear</i>

This article sets out to examine aspects of two canonical texts - texts in which the spoken utterance is instrumental in unsettling and even dismantling some notions of the representation of place and identity common in Western theatre - in order to interrogate the physical language of the stage to which Artaud refers. In Oedipus Tyrannos and King Lear, the figure of the blind man and the action of blinding establishes a theme that activates a broader enquiry into theatre as a medium and mode of signification and expression along the lines proposed by Artaud. In both plays the action is structured around weighty issues: the relationship between power and insight, the violation of moral and ethical responsibilities to kith and kin as well as to the body politic and, ultimately, the consequences of this transgression. Both plays may be interpreted as extended meditations on the dangers of illusion and a wilful avoidance of questioning 'claims to truth', an avoidance that imperils not only the individual concerned but an entire community. In both cases the significance of clear-sightedness and blindness operates literally and resonates figuratively in relation to questions of power and 'truth'.

Plato'sApologyas Tragedy

AbstractIn this article, the work of the cultural historian Jean-Pierre Vernant and the philosophical anthropologist René Girard provides grounds for reflecting on Plato's adaptation of tragedy in theApology, and in particular on Plato's implicit comparison of Socrates with the character of Oedipus in Sophocles'Oedipus Tyrannos. TheApologyuses certain thematic and formal elements of tragedy – including systematic ambiguity, dramatic reversal and recognition, and the figure of a hero who is also a scapegoat – in order to expose the paradoxical combination of persuasion and compulsion at the heart of political life and of philosophical passion and aggression in the soul of the philosopher.

Freud, Kohut, Sophocles: Did Oedipus Do Wrong?

In The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut (1977) claimed to have a fuller understanding of the Oedipus complex than does Freud. In his discussion, he supplemented Freud's notion of “Guilty Man.” Guilty Man directs his life energy toward the activity of the drives; Tragic Man directs his life energy toward the fulfillment of the self. Kohut's formulation adds a depth of complexity that one finds missing in Freud's sexualizing of Oedipus. A fresh look at Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, emphasizing the necessary integrity of Oedipus Tyrannos with Oedipus Coloneus, confirms Sophocles' Oedipus to be more conducive to a Kohutian than to a Freudian reading. Oedipus' development throughout the dramas is interpreted in both Kohutian and Sophoclean terms, and Oedipus' apotheosis at the end of the Oedipus Coloneus is conceived in self-psychological terms as what it means to be fully human.

Antigone Remembers: Dramaturgical Analysis and Oedipus Tyrannos

Dramaturgical analysis brings together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. It is a complex, heterogeneous activity connecting research and practice and is designed to reflect on, as well as to develop and enhance, creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis, as it is examined here, is to open up new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by trying to illuminate these texts from new and innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for the actual stage interpretation of this text. This article addresses some of the issues concerning dramaturgical analysis by examining the process that led up to a production of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos where the author worked with the Swedish director Leif Stinnerbom, the artistic director of the small and highly respected Västanå Theatre located in the Swedish province of Värmland. The Oedipus Tyrannos production analysed here was performed at the Odense municipal theatre in Denmark in 1999, where Stinnerbom was invited as a guest director.

Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering, and Seventeenth-Century Drama (review)

386BCom, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Winter 1997) the notion that the "tragic action . . . evolves from failures oflanguage: spoken and written words at odds with each other and with the characters' actions " (221). James Burke reads the text as a countervailing argument to written authority represented in the play by official documents. By associating Estrella with Saturn, the playwright provides a counterexample to the weakness and lust ofthe king. Charles Oriel contrasts oral speech acts with written ones to show the fluctuating sense of responsibility on the part of the king and others. The last essay reprints Elias Rivers's "The Shame of Writing," where he claims that "writing in itself . . . threatens the honor system " (270), concluding that honor depends on the "nonreiterable uniqueness ofthe performative utterance" to sustain itself(274). In the breadth of its approach and the eminence of its contributors, Heavenly Bodies proves a valuable contribution to the study ofthe comedia in general and to La estrella de Sevilla in particular. Elizabeth Teresa Howe Tuffs University Greenberg, Mitchell. Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering , and Seventeenth-Century Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Paper. 219 pp. Mitchell Greenberg's Canonical States, Canonical Stages, honored by the Modern Language Association with its 1995 Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, seeks to illuminate relationships among seventeenth -century theatrical constructions of modern subjectivity, the simultaneous development of political absolutism in Europe, and questions of Western literary canonicity. Greenberg, a specialist in early modern French literature, addresses works in the British, French, and Spanish canons; comediantes will very likely find his chapters on Lope and Calderón most directly relevant to their own scholarly interests, yet they will also surely find something ofvalue both in the analyses ofplays by Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine and in Greenberg's exploration of the broader epistemological and political shifts that engendered all three great national theaters. Greenberg begins Canonical States by constructing the theoretical foundations upon which both his central argument and his textual analyses will rely. He emphasizes that this study will not seek to establish Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos as a literary source for early modern European drama, but rather that the mythological figure of Oedipus and his fate offer an ex- Reviews387 emplary scenario demonstrating the sociopolitical dynamics of "othering," an exclusionary and sacrificial process through which national identity and absolutist subjectivity were shaped. For Greenberg, the stage "most intensely configures a dialectical space, where competing and contradictory ideologies act out for and through the audience a ritualized, sacrificial mise-ensc ène of society's own internal struggles" (xxvii). Unlike Walter Cohen, who links English and Spanish drama while distancing them from the French stage in Drama ofa Nation, Greenberg conceptually unites the national theaters of early modern England, Spain, and France, asserting that they all served this same cultural function. Oedipus's story, which simultaneously inscribes family relationships in terms of political configurations and vice versa, can easily be viewed as a paradigm for the drama of a patriarchal era that ideologically aligned fathers, kings, and God. In the plays that Greenberg examines, the collisions of social law and individual desire result in the sacrifice of "Oedipal" others— who in these works might be defined racially or sexually — in order to purge the social body ofperilous difference; the absolutist discourse enacted onstage could thus impose itself on the spectators and thereby perpetuate itself on the extratheatrical level, along with the othering mechanism vital to that process. Greenberg turns first to Shakespeare's Othello, offering a striking interpretation emphasizing Venetian society's sacrifice ofboth Desdemona, who embodies disruptive feminine sexuality, and Othello himself, the barbarian other whose resemblance to Oedipus Greenberg convincingly demonstrates. Also worthy of the reader's time are the author's two concluding chapters, the first exploring several Corneille plays (including Le Cid, the analysis of which will likely be of some interest to Hispanists) and the second illuminating Racine's Bérénice, which Greenberg terms "perhaps the most perniciously seductive version ofpersonal and political sacrifice to an implacable paternal injunction" (xxxix). This concluding analysis is the finest in the book. Greenberg devotes the two chapters between Shakespeare and the French playwrights to Fuenteovejuna and La vida es...

A Man of Achievement ‐ Sophocles’ Oedipus

ABSTRACTThis paper traces the psychological implications of Sophocles’ treatment of the Oedipus legend, in the light of Bion's concept of‘catastrophic change’ and Keats's of ‘negative capability’. The first‐written play, Antigone, concludes with the curse of revenge which falls when the mind‐city fails to integrate conflicting emotions. The hero of Oedipus Tyrannos, however, overcomes the mindless pessimism which would deflect him from self‐knowledge, by means of a necessary weaning process founded on memories of infancy. Finally, Oedipus at Colonus shows how mental beauty or poetry metamorphoses from the appearance of ugliness and makes ideas transmissible.

The tragedy of political theory: the road not taken

In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community. Euben makes his argument through a series of comparisons between three dramas (Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae) and three works of classical political theory (Thucydides' History and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Republic) on the issues of justice, identity, and corruption. He brings his discussion to a contemporary American setting in a concluding chapter on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which the road from Argos to Athens, built to differentiate a human domain from the undefined outside, has become a Los Angeles freeway desecrating the land and its people in a predatory urban sprawl.