Dolos and Dikê in Sophokles' Elektra

Dolos and Dikê in Sophokles' Elektra PDF Author: Leona MacLeod
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047400593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The main problem facing critics of Sophokles' Elektra has always been understanding the presentation of the vengeance and the nature of justice it represents. This volume addresses the ethical issues of this play through an analysis of the language and argumentation which the characters use to explain and justify their behaviour. The focus is on the examination of the themes of aidôs and dolos, and the way in which each contributes to our overall understanding of the vengeance as an act which, for all its justice, remains shameful. By exploring the union between these two contradictory elements, this study exposes the ethical complexity of Sophokles' treatment of the vengeance theme. Dolos & Dikê contains a useful critique of recent interpretative approaches to the play, a full bibliography, and a complete index of passages cited.

Dolos and Dikê in Sophokles' Elektra

Dolos and Dikê in Sophokles' Elektra PDF Author: Leona MacLeod
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047400593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The main problem facing critics of Sophokles' Elektra has always been understanding the presentation of the vengeance and the nature of justice it represents. This volume addresses the ethical issues of this play through an analysis of the language and argumentation which the characters use to explain and justify their behaviour. The focus is on the examination of the themes of aidôs and dolos, and the way in which each contributes to our overall understanding of the vengeance as an act which, for all its justice, remains shameful. By exploring the union between these two contradictory elements, this study exposes the ethical complexity of Sophokles' treatment of the vengeance theme. Dolos & Dikê contains a useful critique of recent interpretative approaches to the play, a full bibliography, and a complete index of passages cited.

Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy

Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy PDF Author: Stuart Lawrence
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199659761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Lawrence's volume provides a detailed discussion and analyses of the moral awareness of major characters in Greek tragedy, focusing particularly on the characters' recognition of moral issues and crises, their ability to reflect on them, and their consciousness of doing so. Beginning with a definition of morality and examining the implications of analysing the moral performance of fictional characters, Lawrence considers concepts of the self and the problem of autonomy and personal responsibility in the context of divine intervention, which is a crucial feature of the genre. The volume then moves on to the individual plays (Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Oresteia; Sophocles' Ajax, Trachiniae, Oedipus Tyrannus, Electra, and Philoctetes; and Euripides' Medea, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Heracles, Electra, and Bacchae), focusing in each case on a crisis or crises faced by a major character and examining the background which led to it. Lawrence then considers the individual character's moral response and relates it to the critical issues formulated in the volume's opening discussions. The book will be important to any student of Classical Studies and those in Philosophy or Literature interested in a theoretical discussion of the morality of literary characters.

Sophocles and the Greek Language

Sophocles and the Greek Language PDF Author: Albert Rijksbaron
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047417429
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This volume offers an extensive overview of the various ways in which Sophocles’ use of the Greek language is currently being studied. Greatly admired in antiquity, Sophocles’ style only became a serious subject of investigation with Campbell’s Introductory essay On the language of Sophocles (1879). Fourteen chapters, divided into three sections (diction, syntax, pragmatics), discuss the linguistic register and use of gnomai in Ajax’ deception speech, Homeric intertextuality, the style of the Sophoclean satyr-plays in relation to tragedy and comedy, the relation between the repetition of words and focalization, the language of blindness, the image of ‘fire’, the use of deictic pronouns, the semantics of the middle-passive and of counterfactuals, the historic present and the constitution of the text, the suggestive power of descriptions, speech-acts, and strategies of politeness.

The Philosophical Stage

The Philosophical Stage PDF Author: Joshua Billings
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225079
Category : Greek drama
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence from tragedy and comedy, Joshua Billings shines new light on the development of early Greek philosophy, arguing that drama is our best source for understanding the intellectual culture of classical Athens. In this incisive book, Billings recasts classical Greek intellectual history as a conversation across discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely shared theoretical questions. He argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" was a defined category in the fifth century BCE, and develops a method of reading dramatic form as a structured investigation of issues at the heart of the emerging discipline of philosophy. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's most original classical scholars, The Philosophical Stage presents a novel approach to ancient drama and sets a path for a renewed understanding of early Greek thought.

Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World

Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World PDF Author: David Sacks
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438110200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Discusses the people, places and events found in over 2,000 years of Greek civilization.

Minds on Stage

Minds on Stage PDF Author: Felix Budelmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192888951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Greek tragedy parades, tests, stimulates, and upends human cognition. Characters plot deception, try to fathom elusive gods, and fail to recognise loved ones. Spectators observe the characters' cognitive limitations and contemplate their own, grapple with moral quandaries and emotional breakdown, overlay mythical past and topical present, and all the while imagine that a man with a mask is Helen of Troy. With broad coverage of both plays and cognitive capabilities, Minds on Stage pursues a dual aim: to expand our understanding of Greek tragedy and to use Greek tragedy as a focal point for exploring cognitive thinking about literature. After an introduction that considers questions of methodology, the volume is divided into three parts. Part One examines the dynamics of mind-reading by characters and audience, with articles on Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The chapters in Part Two study aspects of the characters' cognitive sense-making, from individual styles of attributing causes and different manners of remembering, to the use of objects as tools for thinking. Finally, Part Three turns to the cognitive dimension of spectating. The articles treat the spectators' generic expectations and different modes of engagement with the fictional worlds of the plays, the joint nature of their attention to the drama, the nexus between aesthetic illusion and the ethics of deception, as well as the situated nature of cognition that helps both audiences and characters make sense of morally complex situations.

Guilt by Descent

Guilt by Descent PDF Author: N. J. Sewell-Rutter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019161548X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. He pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhaps complementary, ways. All Greek quotations are translated, making his study thoroughly accessible to the non-specialist reader.

Looking at Antigone

Looking at Antigone PDF Author: David Stuttard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350017124
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Antigone is one of the most influential and thought-provoking of all Greek tragedies. Set in a newly victorious society, where possibilities seem boundless and mankind can overcome all boundaries except death, the action is focussed through the prism of Creon, a remarkable anti-hero – a politician who, in crisis, makes a reckless decision, whose pride (or insecurity) prevents him from backing down until it is too late, and who thereby ends up losing everything. Not just the story of a girl who confronts the state, Antigone is an exploration of inherent human conflicts – between men and women, young and old, power and powerlessness, civil law and the 'unwritten laws' of nature. Lauded in Antiquity, it has influenced drama and philosophy throughout history into the modern age. With an introduction discussing the nature of the community for which Antigone was written, this collection of essays by 12 leading academics from across the world draws together many of the themes explored in Antigone, from Sophocles' use of mythology, his contemporaries' reactions and later reception, to questions of religion and ritual, family life and incest, ecology and the environment. The essays are accompanied by David Stuttard's performer-friendly, accurate and easily accessible English translation.

Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras

Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras PDF Author: John Marincola
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748643974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This volume in The Edinburgh Leventis Studies series collects the papers presented at the sixth A. G. Leventis conference organised under the auspices of the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. As with earlier volumes, it engages with new research and new approaches to the Greek past, and brings the fruits of that research to a wider audience. Although Greek historians were fundamental in the enterprise of preserving the memory of great deeds in antiquity, they were not alone in their interest in the past. The Greeks themselves, quite apart from their historians and in a variety of non-historiographical media, were constantly creating pasts for themselves that answered to the needs - political, social, moral and even religious - of their society. In this volume eighteen scholars discuss the variety of ways in which the Greeks constructed de-constructed, engaged with, alluded to, and relied on their pasts whether it was in the poetry of Homer, in the victory odes of Pindar, in tragedy and comedy on the Athenian stage, in their pictorial art, in their political assemblies, or in their religious practices. What emerges is a comprehensive overview of the importance of and presence of the past at every level of Greek society. In the final chapter the three discussants present at the conference (Simon Goldhill, Christopher Pelling and Suzanne Said) survey the contributions to the volume, summarise its overall contributions as well as indicate new directions that further scholarship might follow.

Tragic Props and Cognitive Function

Tragic Props and Cognitive Function PDF Author: Colleen Chaston
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004177388
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
By applying aspects of cognitive psychology to a study of three key tragic props, this book examines the importance of visual imagery in ancient Greek tragedy. The shield, the urn and the mask are props which serve as controls for investigating the connection between visual imagery and the spectators' intellectual experience of tragic drama. As vehicles for conceptual change the props point to a function of imagery in problem solving. Connections between the visual and the cognitive in tragedy, particularly through image shape and its potential for various meanings, add a new perspective to scholarship on the role of the visual in ancient performance. These connections also add weight to the importance of imagery in contemporary problem solving and creative thought.