In this thesis, I argue that Sophoclean characters take shape through a number of different kinds of interaction. On the most basic level, interaction occurs between characters; interactions between characters, however, provide a framework for interactions between those characters and a variety of more abstract concepts. These interactions, by allowing characters to situate themselves with respect to concepts such as, for example, the social roles which shape the society of the play, provide a more complex picture of the personalities depicted onstage; a fuller view of Antigone’s personality, for example, emerges both from her own interactions with the concept of sisterhood and from the differences between her interactions with that concept and Ismene’s. At the same time, these interactions involve the audience in both the construction and the interpretation of Sophoclean characters; as they watch figures interact with each other onstage, the audience, in turn, interact with their own prior knowledge of the concepts which drive the characters of a play. In my five chapters, I discuss five different areas of interaction. In my first chapter, I look at interactions between characters and myth, arguing that Sophoclean characters emerge out of a tension between novelty and familiarity. In my second chapter, I discuss the interactions between characters and their social roles, looking at the problem of appropriate role performance as it applies to Sophoclean characters. My third chapter deals with characters and their memories; I argue that Sophoclean characters shape and are shaped by their memories of past events depending on shifting present circumstances. In my fourth chapter, I discuss the interactions between characters and the passage of time and suggest that Sophoclean figures are characterized by the ways in which they move through time and respond to its passage. In my final chapter, I look at the use of general statements by Sophoclean characters, arguing that the ability of characters to generalize successfully provides a useful measure of their ability to function in the world of the play.

My PhD thesis, The Flower of Suffering, offers a philosophical evaluation of Aeschylus' Oresteia in light of Presocratic ideas. By examining several aspects of the tragic trilogy in relation to some of Aeschylus' near-contemporary thinkers, it aims to unravel the overarching theological ideas and the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions underpinning the Oresteia's dramatic narrative. My aim is to bring to relief those aspects of the Oresteia which I believe will benefit from a comparison with some ideas, or modes of thought, which circulated among the Presocratic philosophers. I will explore how reading some of this tragedy's themes in relation to Presocratic debates about theology and cosmic justice may affect and enhance our understanding of the theological ‘tension' and metaphysical assumptions in Aeschylus' work. In particular, it is my contention that Aeschylus' explicit theology, which has been often misinterpreted as a form of theodicy where the justice of heaven is praised and a faith in the rule of the gods is encouraged, is presented in these terms only to create a stronger collision with the painful reality dramatized from a human perspective. By setting these premises, it is my intention to confer on Greek tragedy a prominent position in the history of early Greek philosophical thought. If the exclusion of Presocratic material from debates about tragedy runs the risk of obscuring a thorough understanding of the broader cultural backdrop against which tragedy was born, the opposite is also true. Greek tragedy represents, in its own dramatic language, a fundamental contribution to early philosophical speculation about the divine, human attitudes towards it, indeed, the human place in relation to the cosmic forces which govern the universe.

by Cindy, Ah Shan Kuan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

No description available.

Yeung Ka-chung, Lorraine. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves viii-xii (3rd gp.)) and index. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter One: --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Aristotelian Tragedy or Greek Tragedy? --- p.6 / Chapter 1. --- Modern Criticism on Aristotle's Poetics --- p.6 / Chapter 2. --- Aristotle's Theory of Greek Tragedy --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1 --- Mimesis and Action --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- Plot-Structure --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Principle of Probability and Necessity --- p.13 / Chapter 2.4 --- Tragedy and History --- p.13 / Chapter 2.5 --- "Pity, Fear and Katharsis" --- p.14 / Chapter 2.6 --- Recognition and Reversal --- p.15 / Chapter 2.7 --- The Proper Kind of Agent --- p.16 / Chapter 2.8 --- The Proper Kind of Circumstances --- p.17 / Chapter 3. --- The Exclusion --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1 --- Does Aristotle exclude the Divinity? --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2 --- Aristotle on Oedipus Tyrannus --- p.21 / Chapter 4. --- The Role of Divinity in Greek Tragedy --- p.22 / Chapter 5. --- The Problem of Tragic Action in Greek Tragedy --- p.24 / Chapter 5.1 --- Aristotle on Tragic Action --- p.24 / Chapter 5.2 --- The Duality of Tragic Action in Greek Tragedy --- p.26 / Chapter 5.3 --- The Tragic Sense of Responsibility --- p.28 / Chapter 6. --- The Different Conception on Happiness --- p.30 / Chapter 7. --- The Problem of Pathos in Greek Tragedy --- p.31 / Chapter 7.1 --- Pathos and Truth --- p.31 / Chapter 7.2 --- The Religious Significance --- p.33 / Chapter 7.3 --- Pathos and Pity among Mortals --- p.34 / Chapter 8. --- The Problem of Conflicts in Greek Tragedy --- p.37 / Chapter 8.1 --- Aristotle and Greek Tragedy on Conflict --- p.38 / Chapter 8.2 --- Agamemnon ´ؤ Killing Among Family --- p.40 / Chapter 8.3 --- The Nature of Tragic Conflicts --- p.42 / Chapter 9. --- Conclusion: Aristotle's Silence --- p.43 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Aristotle on Tuche --- p.45 / Chapter 1. --- Aristotle and the Moral Luck Problem --- p.45 / Chapter 2. --- Tuche in Aristotle's Physics --- p.48 / Chapter 2.1 --- "Tuche and ""What Happens for the Most Part""" --- p.50 / Chapter 2.2 --- "Tuche and ""For the Sake of Something""" --- p.51 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Implications --- p.52 / Chapter 2.4 --- Remarks --- p.56 / Chapter 3. --- Tuche in Aristotle's Two Ethics --- p.57 / Chapter 3.1 --- Tuche in Eudemian Ethics -- Natural Impulse in the Soul --- p.58 / Chapter 3.2 --- Tuche in Nicomachean Ethics: External Goods and Tuche; Happiness and Blessedness --- p.65 / Chapter 4. --- Tuche in Aristotle's Poetics --- p.78 / Chapter 4.1 --- Hamartia - A Cause in Human Terms --- p.80 / Chapter 4.2 --- Errors and Misfortune --- p.82 / Chapter 5. --- Conclusion: Aristotle's Silence on Tuche in Greek Tragedy --- p.85 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- Tuche in Greek Tragedy --- p.88 / Chapter 1. --- A Deeper Sense of Exposition --- p.88 / Chapter 2. --- Tuche as a Goddess --- p.90 / Chapter 3. --- Tuche and Moira in Greek Tragedy -- The Religious Significance --- p.92 / Chapter 3.1 --- Tuche and Moira in Oedipus Tyrannus --- p.94 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Problem of Necessary Chance --- p.97 / Chapter 4. --- Tuche in Oedipus Tyrannus --- p.99 / Chapter 4.1 --- Tuche and Sophoclean Irony --- p.99 / Chapter 4.2 --- Tuche abd Oedipus --- p.103 / Chapter 5. --- Tuche in Euripides' Tragedies --- p.105 / Chapter 5.1 --- Tuche in Heracles --- p.106 / Chapter 5.2 --- Ironic Unconcern - The Tragic Response to Tuche --- p.109 / Chapter 6. --- The Tragic Views --- p.113 / Chapter 6.1 --- The Tragic Views on Man - The Mortal Limitation --- p.114 / Chapter 6.2 --- The Role of the Messenger --- p.115 / Chapter 6.3 --- The Symbolic Meaning of Nature (Physis) --- p.119 / Chapter 7. --- Conclusion: Tuche and Nature --- p.123 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- Tragedy and Philosophy --- p.125 / Chapter 1. --- From Particular to Universal -- The Significance of the Chorus --- p.125 / Chapter 2. --- The Different Way of Formulation Question --- p.129 / Chapter 3. --- The Different Conception Truth - Plato's Simile of the Cave and Oedipus Tyrannus --- p.130 / Chapter 4. --- Conclusion: Greek Tragedy as Philosophy --- p.132 / Chapter Chapter Six: --- Conclusion --- p.133 / Appendix: Related Pictures / Chapter 1. --- The Image of Goddess Tuche (of Antioch) on a Coin --- p.i / Chapter 2. --- The Image of Goddess Tuche (of Ephseus) on a Coin --- p.i / Chapter 3. --- Athena Between Two Warriors --- p.ii / Chapter 4. --- Oedipus and Sphinx --- p.ii / Chapter 5. --- The Images of Achilles and Priam in a Vase Painting --- p.iii / Chapter 6. --- The Images of Achilles and Priam in a Vase Painting --- p.iv / Chapter 7. --- The Images of Ajax and Odysseus in a Vase Painting: Side A: argument between Odysseus and Aja over the possession of the arms of Achilles --- p.x v / Chapter 8. --- Side B: the casting of votes to award the arms --- p.vi / Chapter 9. --- Tondo: Tecmessa covers body of Ajax --- p.vii / Bibliography --- p.viii / Index --- p.xii / Acknowledgement --- p.xv

This thesis investigates the linguistic and philological characteristics of the primary interjections in Ancient Greek drama. It employs Ameka’s definition and classification from 1992 as its theoretical base, and provides a comprehensive research survey. The thesis has a data-driven approach, and is based on all items traditionally classified as interjections. In the chapter on morphology and syntax, the unique characteristics of interjections are presented. E.g., NPs co-occurring with interjections form an interjection phrase, which follows a specific pattern, in accordance with a phrase schema. The chapter on semantics, which is the main part of the thesis, employs an analytical model based on a moderate minimalism approach. This assumes that all items have a core meaning that can be identified without the aid of context, yet allows different, but related, meanings. The definition adopted in the present thesis states that interjections share only formal characteristics, and thus can be divided into categories based on their semantic features, which are defined using Kaplan’s notion of informational equivalence. The thesis deals with three such categories, each with its individual semantic properties: expressive interjections, express the speaker’s experience of emotion and/or cognition; conative interjections, express what the speaker wants the addressee or auditor to do; imitative interjections, depict or reproduce sounds or events. Items in category 1 are the most frequent and thus receive most attention. In the chapter on pragmatics, it is proposed that the primary function of interjections is to express the core semantics in a specified context. Felicity conditions are suggested for an utterance to convey the primary meaning of an interjection. Interjections are also shown to have various secondary functions, e.g. that of strengthening markers. Finally, a lexicon is provided, which offers individual informational equivalents of all interjections under study.

Univ., Diss.--Bologna, 2004. / Contains bibliography (p. 371-429), bibliographical references, notes and indices (p. 433-446).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX210353.

Inaugural-Dissertation--München, 1934.

The purpose of this thesis has been to use tragedy to discover conceptions about mental and emotional processes reflected in contemporary language which, though it may not have been used throughout the society in the particular forms tragedy uses, was understood, and felt to be powerful, by the contemporary audiences of the plays. Through detailed examination of the type of imagery used in thinking about the mind, various inferences have been made about conceptions of the sources of harmful emotion and about the ways in which men judge each other, how they sympathize with each other, and how far they can understand each other's private feelings, in a society which may have been in these respects very different from our own. The material has been confined to tragedy - though parallels from other poets and evidence of particular beliefs and theories have been sought in archaeological data, medicine, philosophy and history - since tragedy, is for two reasons, particularly suitable for a study of this kind. First, the process of watching a tragedy involves observation aid evaluation of other people from their actions; the audience is invited to react to and ponder the implications of different 'serious actions' the imitation of which is included in Aristotle's definition of tragedy. Secondly, tragedy is a musical event which offers in different musical patterns the expression and resolution of extreme emotions; and one of the main points to emerge in this thesis is Greek fears of unrhythmical and uncontrollable emotion. The images associated with emotion are those of savage daemons and wild beasts. As on the mythological level Orpheus could control wild beasts by the power of his music, on the social and dramatic level music, which imposes order, rhythm and harmony on those listening to it and performing it, can calm extreme emotions in ritual and in tragedy, of which it is an essential part. Chapter One: In the Mind. This chapter examines statements about the composition of the mind in tragedy: the different mental organs, located deep within the hitman body, their movement in relation to each other, and their 'darkness'. The images which express the activity of the mind disturbed include: shaking and trembling, filling, swelling and inflammation; wave, storms, wind and breath. The dreams that visit the mind are imagined as coming out of the earth; but the 'muchos' of the mind is implcitly compared to the underground darkness in which the blind seer lives. The mind itself is imagined to be 'prophetic'. The imagery of wave and storm, drawn from the world outside to express feelings within the mind, suggests the easy association of the components of the natural world and the components of the mind; an association demonstrated in the theories of Presocratics and Hippocratic writers. Finally, the supreme fear is fear of the mind 'adrift': the motif of the 'wandering mind' is reflected in the geographical wandering of mad figures in myth. Their activities and feelings are expressed in images and pursuit: of the goad, yoke, and whip. Chapter Two: Into the Mind. This chapter explores the outside sources of mental harm. Passions that trouble the mind are expressed and described with the help of imagery, and the imagery draws mainly on the outside world: on the daemons of cult and fantasy, and on the wild animals who endanger man physically. Part A considers the shapes of persecution, culturally-determined, which provide models for the individual imagination. The Olympian gods, their winged weapons; the Erinyes, their goads and love of blood; the Gorgon, her piercing eye; the Sphinx, her claws and dangerous song; the animals, the 'death-bringers', particularly the bull, horse, dog, lion and snake. Part B examines the images of emotion themselves: wings and piercing weapons; rays of the eye; driving and blows; hunting and ambush; wrestling and capture (human imagery); biting and eating (animal imagery); and imagery from the natural world, wind, wave, fire, storm. Chapter Three: Into And Out Of The Mind. The material studied so far suggests a world-view which emphasizes the external source of human emotion and pain. But some images, some forms of theory, some direct atatements in tragedy (and elsewhere at this period) suggests that another world-view also operated within the imagination; that the source of human emotion and disease lay within man himself. For various reasons, not least emotional comfort, this view is not canvassed as widely, nor does it affect language and belief as powerfully, as the first. There are areas of experience, however, where it is important, and particularly in ideas about madness and demonic possession. Madness in tragedy is presented as a temporary event which passes and leaves the man 'himself' again. The case for belief in demonic possession at this period, which has been challenged recently, is reconsidered; and the implications of demonic possession and inspiration are discussed, of the external and internal sources of power good and bad. Examples are collected of the recognition in tragedy of the projection process, lay which the mind projects its own feelings, particularly the dangerous ones, outside into the world. The psychoanalytic concept of projection is outlined, and the role it has played in psychologically-oriented medical history: particularly in Paracelsus and Freud. Fifth-century medical theories are examined: theories of the origin of the physical and mental disease. These invoke both external sources of harm, and internal ones. In medicine and poetry alike the two views, though apparently paradoxical, operate in a complementary way, since belief is shifting and inconstant in societies and individuals alike. There are parallels in Anthropological material for the complementary relation of inconsistent world views: and the tendency of theorists has always been to divide mental functioning into two types (compare theories which divide mental structures, and divide them into three). Chapter Four: Out Of The Mind. This chapter considers the actions that express emotion. These are of two kinds, the individual actions of which tragedy is composed (considered in chapter five), and involuntary and ritualized actions, which may have sons universal physiological basis but which are also culturally determined. The natural process of observation - 'opsis' - is replaced in tragedy by words (eg 'Why are you pale?'). Physical reactions to emotion mentioned in tragedy are collected, and deductions made by observers about the internal feelings which produce such reactions. Parallels from medicine are considered: the importance of observation in medical theory and practice has given us a picture of the physical symptoms of physical disease which resemble the physical symptoms of emotion recorded in tragedy. There are dangers in taking physical symptoms recorded in poetry too literally (illustrated by a study of Sappho fr. 31), but though the poetic expression of such symptoms is affected by dictates of convention and genre, it does provide evidence for the tendencies of observation and reaction accepted in the whole society, if not for the single 'true' experience of a lyric poet. Tragedy: the main feature in physical symptoms of emotion and madness is a terrifying unrhythmical violence, which corresponds to the wild movements of the pursuing daemons in Chapter two, and the wild twisting movements in the images of the mind of Chapter one. The principle of projection, discussed in Chapter three, is working here, projecting the wild movements of the body of the man suffering intense emotions, onto both his imagined pursuers, and the unseen organs of his mind. Ritualized expression of emotion is an attempt to impose order, rhythm and control on this violence. The ritual expression of grief, the emotion which occurs most often in tragedy, tries to control emotion in two ways.