Author: James Franklin Johnson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806154934
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The ability of human beings to feel compassion or empathy for one another—and express that emotion by offering comfort or assistance—is an important antidote to violence and aggression. In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer and the tragic dramas performed each spring in the Theater of Dionysus offered citizens valuable lessons concerning the necessity and proper application of compassionate action. This book is the first full-length examination of compassion (eleos or oiktos in Greek) as a dramatic theme in ancient Greek literature. Through careful textual analysis, James F. Johnson surveys the treatment of compassion in the epics of Homer, especially the Iliad, and in the works of the three great Athenian tragedians: Aischylos, Euripides, and Sophokles. He emphasizes reciprocity, reverence, and retribution as defining features of Greek compassion during the Homeric and Archaic periods. In framing his analysis, Johnson distinguishes compassion from pity. Whereas in English the word “pity” suggests an attitude of superiority toward the sufferer, the word “compassion” has a more positive connotation and implies equality in status between subject and object. Although scholars have conventionally translated eleos and oiktos as “pity,” Johnson argues that our modern-day notion of compassion comes closest to encompassing the meaning of those two Greek words. Beginning with Homer, eleos normally denotes an emotion that entails action of some sort, whereas oiktos usually refers to the emotion itself. Johnson also draws associations between compassion and the concepts of fear and pity, which Aristotle famously attributed to tragedy. Because the Athenian plays are tragedies, they mainly show the disastrous consequences of a world where compassion falls short. At the same time, they offer glimpses into a world where compassion can generate a more beneficial—and therefore more hopeful—outcome. Their message resonates with today’s readers as much as it did for fifth-century Athenians.
Author: Simon Critchley
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782834907
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where 'Critchley on Tragedy' is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy. Simon Critchley demolishes our common misconceptions about the poets, dramatists and philosophers of Ancient Greece - then presents these writers to us in an unfamiliar and original light.
Author: Arthur Elam Haigh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Greek drama (Tragedy)
Languages : en
Pages : 582
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Book Description
Author: Chris Kraus
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
A collection of essays that brings new insight to the question of the continuing, and inexhaustible, fascination of Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE. There is particular reference to the visual - the myriad ways in which tragic texts are (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and (re)visualized through verbal and artistic description.
Author: W. B. Stanford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317698762
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
According to Aristotle the main purpose of tragedy is the manipulation of emotions, and yet there are relatively few accessible studies of the precise dynamics of emotion in the Athenian theatre. In Greek Tragedy and the Emotions, first published in 1993, W.B. Stanford reviews the evidence for ‘emotionalism’ – as the great Attic playwrights presented it, as the actors and choruses expressed it, and as their audiences reacted to it. Sociological aspects of the issue are considered, and the whole range of emotions, not just ‘pity and fear’, is discussed. The aural, visual and stylistic methods of inciting emotion are analysed, and Aeschylus’ Oresteia is examined exclusively in terms of the emotions that it exploits. Finally, Stanford’s conclusions are contrasted with the accepted theories of tragic ‘catharsis’. Greek terms are transliterated and all quotations are in translation, so Greek Tragedy and the Emotions will appeal particularly to those unfamiliar with Classical Greek.
Author: Aeschylus
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the plague that has struck his city, only to disover the devastating truth about his relationship with his mother and his father. Medea is the terrible story of a woman's bloody revenge on her adulterous husband through the murder of her own children.
Author: Martin Revermann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
Explores Brecht's complex relationship with Greek tragedy and the tragic tradition, including significant archival material not seen before.
Author: Anna A. Lamari
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110559935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
An inexplicably understudied field of classical scholarship, tragic reperformance, has been surveyed in its true dimension only in the very recent years. Building on the latest discussions on tragic restagings, this book provides a thorough survey of reperformance of Greek tragedy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, also addressing its theatrical, political, and cultural context. In the fifth and fourth centuries, tragic restagings were strongly tied to cultural mobility and exchange. Poets, actors, texts, vases, and vase-painters were traveling, bridging the boundaries between mainland Greece and Magna Graecia, boosting the spread of theater, facilitating theatrical literacy, and setting a new theatrical status quo, according to which popular tragic plays were restaged, by mobile actors, in numerous dramatic festivals, in and out of Attica, with or without the supervision of their composers. This book offers a holistic examination of ancient reperformances of tragedy, enhancing our perception of them as a vital theatrical practice that played a major part in the development of the tragic genre in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.
Author: Jean-Pierre Vernant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Author: J Michael Walton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317513967
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
In this updated and extended edition of The Greek Sense of Theatre, scholar and practitioner J.Michael Walton revises and expands his visual approach to the theatre of classical Athens. From the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to the old and new comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, he argues that while Greek drama is seen now as a performance-based rather than a strictly literary medium, more attention should still be paid to the nature of stage image and masked acting as part of this conception.
