Depuis plus d’un siècle, la Grèce antique ne cesse d’éblouir philosophes et hommes de lettre en Occident. La tragédie occupe une place éminente dans cet émerveillement venu de l’Athènes du Ve siècle avant Jésus-Christ. C’est pour matérialiser cette fascination que ce théâtre a donné lieu à des interprétations de tout genre : philosophique, humaniste, politique et morale... Il s’agit de lectures idéologiques dont la tragédie en général et Sophocle en particulier a fait l’objet. Dans cette perspective, il importait d’effectuer un panorama des lectures de cette tragédie devenue un mythe contemporain. L’oeuvre de Sophocle a servi d’illustration à la visée idéologique d’un théâtre qui s’intégrait à l’origine dans le cadre des manifestations culturelles en l’honneur de Dionysos à Athènes. Y avait-il lieu d’universaliser et d’immortaliser ces interprétations, fruits de l’imaginaire occidental ? Fallait-il continuer la réincarnation des personnages de Sophocle qui aurait avec son Antigone et son OEdipe-roi réussi à élaborer des modèles inimitables de la tragédie et de l’existence de l’homme ? C’est pour questionner cette vision de Sophocle qu’il semble nécessaire d’exploiter les éléments esthétiques (chant, musique) de cette tragédie qui offrent de nouvelles pistes de réflexion en porte-à-faux avec la lecture idéologique observée dans la critique contemporaine. / For over a century the ancient Greek philosophers have amazed men of letters in the West. Since thefifth century BC tragedy as a genre has occupied a prominent place in Athens and through theatre this fascination has given rise to interpretations of all kinds: philosophical, humanistic, political and moral. These ideological readings of tragedy have most significantly focused on Sophocles. This dissertation offers a survey of these readings which have in time become contemporary myths. Sophocles’ works are ideologically embedded within cultural spectacle honoring Dionysus in Athens. Was it necessary to universalize and immortalize these western interpretations and reincarnate Sophocles’ characters, making Antigone and Oedipus Rex inimitable models of tragedy and mortal existence? This study proposes a critical reading of the Sophoclean vision of tragedy through an analysis of certain aesthetic elements (song, music) which allow a rethinking of the ideological readings observed in contemporary criticism

Sam Shepard was a playwright who used a variety of stories and styles to explore and understand the country he called home, The United States of America. This thesis launches the process of understanding how Greek tragedy had influenced the work of Shepard in his explorations by looking at Shepard’s final play before his passing, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations). Using the concept of miasma that has been established as important to Greek tragedy to analyze A Particle of Dread and its primary source work, Oedipus Rex, this thesis reveals the extent of the ancient tragic form’s presence in Shepard’s last play. To do so, I approach the work in a combination of theory and practice. I first use dramaturgical analysis of Oedipus Rex, to explain what tragic role miasma has in Sophocles’ play. This is followed by a mirrored dramaturgical analysis of A Particle of Dread to uncover and compare what place miasma (and therefore tragedy) has in Shepard’s play. Following this is the review and analysis of five performance workshops exploring scenes of Shepard’s play which used a combination of performance and lighting to physicalize that dramaturgical work so as to further it and hopefully reveal new aspects through their embodiment. This dramaturgical and practical work results in the discovery of how and to what end Shepard has chosen to use the Grecian content style to analyze and commentate on Western society. The work also offers the chance to compare how the engagement with pollution has changed from the characters of 5th Century BCE Greece to 2014 America, and what that might mean for 2020 onwards.

Contrairement à la lamentation rituelle, les lamentations tragiques sont réalisées dans un large éventail de situations. En effet, elles peuvent avoir lieu avant l’événement déploré, porter sur d’autres malheurs qu’un décès, ou encore lamenter le sort de la personne même qui mène la lamentation. Cette variété de contextes est vraisemblablement à l’origine de la grande diversité de formes et de contenus des lamentations que l’on trouve dans le corpus tragique. De quelle façon les tragédiens modifient-ils la forme traditionnelle de la lamentation ? Ces modifications dépendent-elles d’éléments contextuels particuliers ? Pour répondre à ces questions, j’examinerai trois passages : Cassandre dans l’Agamemnon d’Eschyle, Créon dans l’Antigone de Sophocle et Polymestor dans l’Hécube d’Euripide. Ces trois lamentations ont lieu dans des contextes très différents, notamment en ce qui concerne l’identité du lamentant (genre, âge, statut social, ethnicité) et la relation que celui-ci entretient avec le Chœur. De surcroît, elles ont été composées par des auteurs et à des dates différentes, ce qui permettra de prendre en compte l’évolution de la forme au cours du Vème siècle avant J.-C. L’analyse suggère que la forme de la lamentation du personnage s’adapte surtout à son ethnicité et à son genre, tandis que la participation du Chœur dépend directement de sa relation avec le lamentant. Parfois, la stylistique est également influencée par le style propre à l’auteur ou par la date de composition de la pièce. Quant au contenu, les thèmes abordés sont principalement déterminés par la position et la fonction du passage dans la tragédie. Puisque les fonctions d’une lamentation tragique sont différentes de celles d’une lamentation rituelle, le modèle de la lamentation funèbre est insuffisant pour guider à lui seul l’analyse du contenu d’une lamentation tragique. / Unlike ritual laments, tragic laments take place in a wide range of situations. Some are made over troubles other than an actual death, over events that have not happened yet, or over the mourner himself. This seems to be why we find such a huge diversity of both forms and contents of laments within the tragic corpus. How do the tragic poets modify the traditional form of the lament? Do these changes depend on specific contextual elements? In order to answer these questions, I will examine three laments: Cassandra’s in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Creon’s in Sophocles’ Antigone and Polymestor’s in Euripides’ Hecuba. These three passages show major contextual discrepancies, especially when it comes to the identity of the mourner (gender, age, social status, ethnicity) and their relationship to the Chorus. Moreover, they were composed by different authors at different times, which accounts for the evolution of the literary form during the 5th century B.C. These contextual differences allow us to identify specific ties between the context and the lament itself. The form of the actor’s part depends mostly on the mourner’s ethnicity and gender, while the Chorus’ part suits its relationship with the mourner. The stylistics of the lament may also result from the author’s personal preferences or from the date of composition. As for the content, it is heavily determined by the position and the function of the passage within the play. As the functions of a tragic lament differ from those of a ritual lament, the model given by ritual lament cannot serve as the only basis for the analysis of a tragic lament’s content.

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated in, she exceeds ideas of the individual subject as the site of authorship. Ultimately, Carson enacts a theory of translation that critically deconstructs translation itself.

This dissertation demonstrates how props act as conduits of knowledge and (thus?) power in Sophocles’ “non-Theban” plays. I show how certain props challenge the definitions and values that they accrue as they move between actors onstage. Key props in these four plays behave unlike other props in extant tragedy, opening up the possibility for a sustained inquiry into the ways that property speaks to and for power. Focusing on the urn in Electra, the bow in Philoctetes, Hector’s sword and Ajax’s own shield in Ajax, and the robe in Trachiniae, this project argues for the centrality of these props in these plays’ verbal exchanges. The introduction sets up a framework and methodology that draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu alongside contemporary thinkers like Jack Halberstam, Jane Bennett, and Sara Ahmed. The first chapter, “The Urn is the Wor(l)d in Sophocles’ Electra,” builds on prior scholarship on this much-studied stage object by showing how it accrues “symbolic power” and comes to construct reality and the social world. The possibility of that consensus breaks down, however, in the face of the familiar/l strife at Argos, and it is through this breakdown that the urn gives audience members a way to examine the play’s puzzling lack of resolution. The second chapter, “Stringing a Bow: Learning, use, and power in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” builds on the previous chapters’ by showing how the bow defines the limits of Neoptolemus’ education on Lemnos and the terms of its own exchange. The bow’s frequent back and forth between characters and its role in Odysseus’s subterfuge belie the fact that it still belongs to Heracles, who alone can authorize its use. This reading draws out the strange relationship between the deceptions of the False Merchant and the divine interventions of Heracles, demonstrating an uncomfortable consonance between the two scenes. The third chapter, entitled “Ajax’s economy of hostility: the necropolitics of kleos,” explores how Ajax paradoxically gives up his shield even as it merges with his identity as a defense for the Achaeans against the Trojans. Ajax himself attempts to manipulate this threat through the handling and “exchange” of the sword of Hector with its native soil, misleading his compatriots — and possibly himself — about his intentions in his so-called “deception speech.” When Hector’s sword pierces Ajax’s body, Trojan and personal hostilities merge until Odysseus manages to rectify the play’s errant exchanges and restore Ajax’s status as a shield for his companions. The fourth and final chapter, “Ceci n’est pas un prop: The robe as gift and garment in Sophocles’ Trachiniae,” shows that the robe’s failure to appear onstage as a prop — the audience might see it as part of Heracles’ costume at the end of the play — enacts the conflict between oikos and wilderness that the characters inhabit, exposing them to the threats of order and disorder as they attempt to integrate Heracles’ pure excess into the oikonomia of Trachis. This process ultimately reveals the futility of attempts to analyze the play in terms of its dichotomies: female-male, oikos-polis, concealed-revealed, etc. The circulation of the robe in its box charts a path for understanding the play in terms that defy dichotomization by locating the play’s exchanges along intersecting modes of valuation. In the conclusion, I widen the perspective of this methodology again, turning to the instrumentalization of bodies in Sophocles’ Theban plays. I raise questions about how meaning, use, value, and power come to be confused via onstage exchanges, and I gesture towards possible future avenues of inquiry that might account for the trouble with bodies that Ajax raises.

"Exclusion in Sophocles" dass Exklusion als Motiv sich durch alle erhaltenen Sophoklesstücke zieht nebst einiger der längeren Fragmente. Auffällig ist die Vielfalt des Motivs, welches sich auf einen Ausschluss aus der Familie (Elektra), der Stadt (Ödipus-Dramen), der Armee (Philoktet), der Gemeinschaft der Menschen (Tereus) und noch vieles Weitere bezieht. Diese Arbeit sammelt, ordnet und analysiert sophokleische Exklusionsszenarien. Insbesondere wird der Gebrauch von Tropologien des Un/Menschlichen in der extrinsischen Charakterisierung der tragischen Protagonisten herausgestellt sowie damit verbundene Metaphern des Pathologischen, Monströsen, Bestialen und sog. Primitiven als Marker und Auslöser von strukturellen Exklusionen. Dabei wird das Exklusionsmotiv nicht als vollendete Tatsache erfasst, sondern als dynamischer und sich teilweise über ganze Plots hinweg erstreckender Prozess, als Narrativ eines ehemals gut Eingegliederten und von der Gemeinschaft nach und nach Exkludierten. Gleichwohl diese Entwicklung vom tragischen Protagonisten in eloquenten und selbstdarstellerischen Reden vehement kritisiert wird, erwächst im Bereich der Metaphern und rhetorischen Bildsprache der Gemeinschaft eine regelrechte Ausradierung und Neuzuweisung seiner Identität. Durch eine vergleichende Gegenüberstellung beider Standpunkte stellt sich heraus, wie tiefgreifend die als Exkludierend handelnde Gemeinschaft in das Vorantschreiten des tragischen Geschehens involviert ist und die Dramen eben nicht nur—wie in zahlreichen Forschungsstandpunkten festgehalten—die Manci des Exkludierten Protagonisten als moralische Fabel vorführen. / Social exclusion as a literary theme is common to all of Sophocles' fully extant plays as well as some of the longer fragments. The variety of settings is wide, between exclusion from the family like for example in Electra, exclusion from the city as in the case of Oedipus, from a regiment of the armed forces like in Ajax or Philoctetes, or even humankind, like with Tereus. This inquiry sets out to present, taxonomize and unpack Sophoclean discourses of exclusion and their attaining literary tropes of the pathological, the bestial, the brutish, the monstrous, and the so-called uncivilized. The aim is to demonstrate how deeply implicated the whole cast of characters and their language are in the process of a tragedy unfolding, rather than the causes of tragedy being lodged in the doings of one protagonist alone. One key point argued here is that, instead of taking 'the isolation of the tragic hero' as fait accompli, exclusion is a dynamic process that often takes up the entire plot arc of a tragedy. In the space of extrinsic characterization, it is argued that a process of rhetorical erasure and overwriting of identity takes place, where peer groups gradually dismantle a formerly well-established identity and re-assign a new and undesirable one. It is shown how the protagonists seek to resist, lament or somehow negotiate this process through long and expansive speeches of futile self-reinstatement. In the synthesis of both, it is argued that Sophocles' deployment of the theme puts a critical spotlight on the rhetorics of exclusion and its discourses of the bestial, the brutal, and especially the pathological, which embed and frame the work's overall literary, cultural and dramatic effects.