Author: J. Peter Euben
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520055728
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Greek Tragedy and Political Theory
Author: J. Peter Euben
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520055728
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520055728
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
The Tragedy of Political Theory
Author: J. Peter Euben
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069102314X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069102314X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
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.
Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy
Author: Peter J. Ahrensdorf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139475584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
In this book, Peter Ahrensdorf examines Sophocles' powerful analysis of a central question of political philosophy and a perennial question of political life: should citizens and leaders govern political society by the light of unaided human reason or religious faith? Through an examination of Sophocles' timeless masterpieces - Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone - Ahrensdorf offers a sustained challenge to the prevailing view, championed by Nietzsche in his attack on Socratic rationalism, that Sophocles is an opponent of rationalism. Ahrensdorf argues that Sophocles is a genuinely philosophical thinker and a rationalist, albeit one who advocates a cautious political rationalism. Ahrensdorf concludes with an incisive analysis of Nietzsche, Socrates and Aristotle on tragedy and philosophy. He argues, against Nietzsche, that the rationalism of Socrates and Aristotle incorporates a profound awareness of the tragic dimension of human existence and therefore resembles in fundamental ways the somber and humane rationalism of Sophocles.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139475584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
In this book, Peter Ahrensdorf examines Sophocles' powerful analysis of a central question of political philosophy and a perennial question of political life: should citizens and leaders govern political society by the light of unaided human reason or religious faith? Through an examination of Sophocles' timeless masterpieces - Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone - Ahrensdorf offers a sustained challenge to the prevailing view, championed by Nietzsche in his attack on Socratic rationalism, that Sophocles is an opponent of rationalism. Ahrensdorf argues that Sophocles is a genuinely philosophical thinker and a rationalist, albeit one who advocates a cautious political rationalism. Ahrensdorf concludes with an incisive analysis of Nietzsche, Socrates and Aristotle on tragedy and philosophy. He argues, against Nietzsche, that the rationalism of Socrates and Aristotle incorporates a profound awareness of the tragic dimension of human existence and therefore resembles in fundamental ways the somber and humane rationalism of Sophocles.
The Tragedy of Political Theory
Author: J. Peter Euben
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218188
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218188
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
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.
The Politics of Greek Tragedy
Author: David M. Carter
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781904675167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Part of the 'Greece and Rome Live' series, which aims to introduce figures and aspects of the ancient world to the general reader, this is a guide to the political aspect of Greek tragedy using close examination of specific plays. A handy combined index/glossary and a bibliography are included.
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781904675167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Part of the 'Greece and Rome Live' series, which aims to introduce figures and aspects of the ancient world to the general reader, this is a guide to the political aspect of Greek tragedy using close examination of specific plays. A handy combined index/glossary and a bibliography are included.
Eros and Polis
Author: Paul W. Ludwig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Eros and Polis examines how and why Greek theorists treated political passions as erotic. Because of the tiny size of ancient Greek cities, contemporary theory and ideology could conceive of entire communities based on desire. A recurrent aspiration was to transform the polity into one great household that would bind the citizens together through ties of mutual affection. In this study, Paul Ludwig evaluates sexuality, love and civic friendship as sources of political attachment and as bonds of political association. Studying the ancient view of eros recovers a way of looking at political phenomena that provides a bridge, missing in modern thought, between the private and public spheres, between erotic love and civic commitment. Ludwig's study thus has important implications for the theoretical foundations of community.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Eros and Polis examines how and why Greek theorists treated political passions as erotic. Because of the tiny size of ancient Greek cities, contemporary theory and ideology could conceive of entire communities based on desire. A recurrent aspiration was to transform the polity into one great household that would bind the citizens together through ties of mutual affection. In this study, Paul Ludwig evaluates sexuality, love and civic friendship as sources of political attachment and as bonds of political association. Studying the ancient view of eros recovers a way of looking at political phenomena that provides a bridge, missing in modern thought, between the private and public spheres, between erotic love and civic commitment. Ludwig's study thus has important implications for the theoretical foundations of community.
Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy
Author: Robert Carl Pirro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
A German Jewish refugee suffering tremendous personal and political upheaval during the years of Nazi conquest, Hannah Arendt turned to classical literature and drama as she struggled to make sense of the terrible events of her time. Studying fiction, plays, and poetry, she found a way to meld theoretical political philosophy and concrete personal commitment to action. Among her literary resources, the epics and plays of ancient Greece provided the ideal balance of politics and culture. In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, Pirro focuses especially on the influence of Greek tragedy on Arendt's political writings. Pirro casts Arendt's political thought as tragic storytelling, crafted to inspire her audience both to appreciate political freedoms and to act on those freedoms by participating in public life. Echoing an affinity for Greek drama common in the tradition of German philosophy and letters, Arendt draws on tragic characters, scenes, and dramatic conventions, as well as theories, to assess the maddening and often fatal contradictions of political life in modern times. Classical narratives of heroic achievements and failures shape the structure and content of Arendtian thought, as when she compares Jewish refugees' attempts to confront their stateless condition during the 1930s and 1940s to Ulysses's mythical quest. Turning her attention in the postwar years to the promise and limits of political freedom in American life, Arendt invokes Sophocles's last drama, Oedipus at Colonus, in an attempt to outline an alternative, aesthetic sense of political authority in the American Republic. In providing this new avenue of approach to Arendt, Pirro shows how elements of Greek tragedy helped her grapple with the problems of modern politics in the chaos of a universe without rules. Arendt enthusiasts and readers interested in the classics and politics will find fresh ideas to consider in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
A German Jewish refugee suffering tremendous personal and political upheaval during the years of Nazi conquest, Hannah Arendt turned to classical literature and drama as she struggled to make sense of the terrible events of her time. Studying fiction, plays, and poetry, she found a way to meld theoretical political philosophy and concrete personal commitment to action. Among her literary resources, the epics and plays of ancient Greece provided the ideal balance of politics and culture. In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, Pirro focuses especially on the influence of Greek tragedy on Arendt's political writings. Pirro casts Arendt's political thought as tragic storytelling, crafted to inspire her audience both to appreciate political freedoms and to act on those freedoms by participating in public life. Echoing an affinity for Greek drama common in the tradition of German philosophy and letters, Arendt draws on tragic characters, scenes, and dramatic conventions, as well as theories, to assess the maddening and often fatal contradictions of political life in modern times. Classical narratives of heroic achievements and failures shape the structure and content of Arendtian thought, as when she compares Jewish refugees' attempts to confront their stateless condition during the 1930s and 1940s to Ulysses's mythical quest. Turning her attention in the postwar years to the promise and limits of political freedom in American life, Arendt invokes Sophocles's last drama, Oedipus at Colonus, in an attempt to outline an alternative, aesthetic sense of political authority in the American Republic. In providing this new avenue of approach to Arendt, Pirro shows how elements of Greek tragedy helped her grapple with the problems of modern politics in the chaos of a universe without rules. Arendt enthusiasts and readers interested in the classics and politics will find fresh ideas to consider in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy.
Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists
Author: Michael Gagarin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521437684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
Including the works of more than thirty authors, this edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes the origin of human society and law; the nature of justice and good government; the distribution of power among genders and social classes.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521437684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
Including the works of more than thirty authors, this edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes the origin of human society and law; the nature of justice and good government; the distribution of power among genders and social classes.
American Mourning
Author: Simon Stow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107158060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
This insightful study employs public mourning as a lens to identify and address the shortcomings of American democracy.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107158060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
This insightful study employs public mourning as a lens to identify and address the shortcomings of American democracy.
Euripides and the Politics of Form
Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202370
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits—from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense—shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated—and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202370
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits—from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense—shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated—and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.