The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama

Front Cover
Victoria Pedrick, Steven M. Oberhelman
University of Chicago Press, 2005 - 323 pages
The Soul of Tragedy brings together top scholars to offer a wide range of perspectives on Greek tragedy. The collection pays homage to this ancient, enduring theatrical and literary genre by offering a deep exploration into the oldest form of dramatic expression. It is a reminder that, for all their years, these dramas still have much to teach us.

Exemplary of the nature and scope of this book, the essays range from Simon Goldhill's comparative study of music, gender, and culture to Martha Nussbaum's inspection of "the comic soul." Through the critical lenses of psychoanalysis, gender, social history, and philology, this compilation looks at Greek tragedy's peculiar power to illuminate the workings of the human soul. Structures of tragic meaning, the relationship between character desire and spectator experience, and investigations of tragedy's extraordinary preoccupation with gender reveal the form's emotional core and explain its rapid ascent through the hierarchy of cultural practices in classical Greece. The Soul of Tragedy is a celebration and a model of collaboration that will be essential reading for scholars in classics, literature, and drama.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
I THE GEOMETRY OF SUFFERING
11
Aristotle on the Tragic Emotions
13
Divine and Human in Sophocles Philoctetes
27
Euripides Heaven
49
Dionysiac Triangles
73
II A VAST CONTINENT OF SORROWS
89
The Subject of Desire in Sophocles Antigone
91
Women in Groups
183
Redeeming Matricide?
199
Clytemnestras First Marriage
227
IV CAUTIONARY TALES
249
Visuality and Temporality
251
Music Gender and Hellenistic Society
271
The Tyranny of Germany over Greece
291
List of Contributors
307

Beyond Sexual Difference
137
Or This Phallus That Is Not One
155
III THE ORDINARY HORRORS OF THE FEMININE
181

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About the author (2005)

Victoria Pedrick is associate professor in the Department of Classics at Georgetown University. Steven M. Oberhelman is professor in the Department of European and Classical Languages at Texas A&M University.

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