The Strangeness of Tragedy

The Strangeness of Tragedy
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 216
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199572601
ISBN-13 : 0199572607
Rating : 4/5 (01 Downloads)

Synopsis The Strangeness of Tragedy by : Paul Hammond

This book explores the theatrical and linguistic means by which the tragic protagonist is estranged from other characters and comes to occupy a singular world in which the autonomy of the individual seems uncertain, discussing plays from classical, renaissance, and neo-classical literature by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Racine.

The Strangeness of Tragedy

The Strangeness of Tragedy
Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Total Pages : 216
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780191610196
ISBN-13 : 0191610194
Rating : 4/5 (96 Downloads)

Synopsis The Strangeness of Tragedy by : Paul Hammond

This book reads tragedy as a genre in which the protagonist is estranged from the world around him, and, displaced in time, space, and language, comes to inhabit a milieu which is no longer shared by other characters. This alienation from others also entails a decomposition of the integrity of the individual, which is often seen in tragedy's uncertainty about the protagonists' autonomy: do they act, or do the gods act through them? Where are the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries of the human? After an introductory essay exploring the theatrical and linguistic means by which the protagonist is made to inhabit a strange and singular world, the book devotes essays to plays from classical, renaissance, and neo-classical literature by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Racine. Close attention is paid to the linguistic strangeness of the texts which is often smoothed over by editors and translators, as it is through the weirdness of tragic language that the deep estrangement of the characters is shown. Accordingly, the Greek, Latin, and French texts are quoted in the originals, with translations added, and attention is paid to textual cruces which illustrate the linguistic and conceptual difficulties of these plays.

Theatre History Studies 2011, Vol. 31

Theatre History Studies 2011, Vol. 31
Author :
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Total Pages : 190
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780817356842
ISBN-13 : 0817356843
Rating : 4/5 (42 Downloads)

Synopsis Theatre History Studies 2011, Vol. 31 by : Rhona Justice-Malloy

"Theatre History Studies" is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text as well as SIRS From published reviews “This established annual is a major contribution to the scholarly analysis and historical documentation of international drama. Refereed, immaculately printed and illustrated . . . . The subject coverage ranges from the London season of 1883 to the influence of David Belasco on Eugene O’Neill.”—CHOICE “International in scope but with an emphasis on American, British, and Continental theater, this fine academic journal includes seven to nine scholarly articles dealing with everything from Filipino theater during the Japanese occupation to numerous articles on Shakespearean production to American children’s theater. . . . an excellent addition for academic, university, and large public libraries.”—Magazines for Libraries, 6th Edition

Racine’s Tragedies of Tyranny

Racine’s Tragedies of Tyranny
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 245
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004695689
ISBN-13 : 9004695680
Rating : 4/5 (89 Downloads)

Synopsis Racine’s Tragedies of Tyranny by :

In Bajazet and Mithridate Racine depicts the tragedies of characters who either wield tyrannic power or are subjected to tyranny. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts. The contributors to this volume examine Racine’s stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.

Tragedy

Tragedy
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 208
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0226458261
ISBN-13 : 9780226458267
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Synopsis Tragedy by : Richard Kuhns

Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation, Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that have dominated modern discussions. From Aeschylus' classic drama The Persians to the hidden tragic themes in The Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. The study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.

Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy

Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 225
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780198907107
ISBN-13 : 0198907109
Rating : 4/5 (07 Downloads)

Synopsis Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy by : Laurence Publicover

This book demonstrates how a group of tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries stage the fear and exhilaration generated by encounters with the unknown and the extraordinary. Arguing that the maritime art of fathoming--that is, dropping a lead and line into water to measure its depth--operates as a master-image for these plays, it illustrates how they create sublime horror through intuitions of mysterious more-than-human agencies and of worlds beyond the visible. Though tightly focused on a specific body of imagery, the book strikes up dialogue with a number of critical fields, including theories and histories of tragedy; ecocriticism and the environmental humanities; oceanic studies; and work on early modern ideas about the body, madness, and language. Countering a tendency within tragic theory to value the textual over the dramatic, it also demonstrates how the tragic effects to which it points are created through specific theatrical strategies, including the use of offstage space, intertheatricality, and the violation of dramatic conventions. Situating its arguments within recent criticism on these plays and on tragedy more generally, and pushing back against scholarship that regards the genre in Shakespeare's time as concerned more with pity than with fear, the book offers fresh and detailed readings of some of the most frequently studied plays in the English canon, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling.

Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy

Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 441
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781107033283
ISBN-13 : 1107033284
Rating : 4/5 (83 Downloads)

Synopsis Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy by : Renaud Gagné

This volume explores how the choruses of Ancient Greek tragedy creatively combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms of meaning. The contributors analyse choruses as fictional, religious and civic performers; as combinations of text, song and dance; and as objects of reflection in themselves, in relation and contrast to the choruses of comedy and melic poetry. Drawing on earlier analyses of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual dimensions of tragedy, and the relations between dramatic and melic choruses, the chapters explore the uses of various analytic tools in allowing us better to capture the specificity of the tragic chorus. Special attention is given to the physicality of choral dancing, musical interactions between choruses and actors, the trajectories of reception, and the treatment of time and space in the odes.

Greek Tragic Style

Greek Tragic Style
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 493
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780521848909
ISBN-13 : 0521848903
Rating : 4/5 (09 Downloads)

Synopsis Greek Tragic Style by : R. B. Rutherford

An exploration of the poetic qualities of the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides highlighting their similarities and differences.

Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire

Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 388
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004467378
ISBN-13 : 9004467378
Rating : 4/5 (78 Downloads)

Synopsis Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire by : Paul Hammond

Are we free agents? This perennial question is addressed by tragedy when it dramatizes the struggle of individuals with supernatural forces, or maps the inner conflict of a mind divided against itself. The first part of this book follows the adaptations of four myths as they migrate from classical Greek tragedy to Seneca and on to seventeenth-century France: the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, and Phaedra. Detailed linguistic analysis charts the playwrights’ contrasting assumptions about agency and autonomy. In the second part, six plays by Corneille and Racine are discussed to show how the problem of agency and free will is explored in scenarios which show protagonists who are in thrall to their past, to their rulers, or to their own ideals.

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 379
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317313113
ISBN-13 : 1317313119
Rating : 4/5 (13 Downloads)

Synopsis An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by : Andrew Bennett

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.