MA (Tshivenda) / Senthara ya M.E.R. Mathivha ya Nyambo dza Afrika, Vhutsila na Mvelele / See the attached abstract below

This study explores how in central plays of Euripides – namely, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Helen, and Bacchae – bodies, landscapes, and objects (both seen on stage and described in speeches, dialogues, and choral odes) serve as media for assessing affective states, materializing the characters’ feelings and sensations and hence enabling the audience to vividly perceive them. My focus is grounded in the ancient conceptions of bodies and the senses in material from the Pre-Socratic and the Hippocratic writings, including theories about how the surrounding environment influences bodily types. It is also underpinned by theoretical perspectives that have come to prominence in recent research in ancient literature and culture. First, it draws on insights from phenomenology, aesthetics, and affective theory that in ancient drama highlight embodiment, synaesthesia, and the circulation of affects among characters and spectators. Second, it engages with works inspired by the new materialisms, which have produced a new attention to the mutual and symbiotic relationship between humans and nonhuman entities. Finally, it is based on the “enactive” approach to cognition, which makes a compelling case for visualization (e.g., spectators’ imagination of the things sung, spoken, or narrated) as grounded in the active, embodied structure of experience. Building on such theories, I posit that Euripides’ plays illustrate how the characters’ feelings and emotions combine with sensory indicators (sight, taste, smell, and touch), so that they operate as visible marks of states usually conceived of as inner. These states are, I suggest, exteriorized not only on bodies but also in their surroundings, such that landscapes as mapped onto the dramatic stage and objects with which the characters interact function as supplements to embodied affective manifestations. In addition to onstage action, I focus on how Euripides’ language triggers a strong resonance in the spectators’ imagination. In this regard, my argument takes up the insights of ancient critics such as Longinus, who has praised Euripides’ ability to generate “emotion” (τὸ παθητικόν) and “excitement” (τὸ συγκεκινημένον) in the audience through “visualization” (φαντασία) and “vividness” (ἐνάργεια). Thus, I examine how references to onstage performance and visualizing language interact, giving the spectators a full picture of the dramatic action. In Alcestis, I explore how embodiment, sensorial phenomena, and physical interactions put the characters’ feelings of pain and grief on prominent display, eliciting the audience’s sensory reaction. In Hippolytus, I examine how the characters’ emotions blend into the surroundings, such that forms, colors, and textures of landscape and objects allow the spectators to perceive inner states more forcefully. In Helen, I investigate how material and nonhuman things, such as rivers, plants, costumes, weapons, statues, ships connect to the characters as parts of an affective entanglement that heightens the experiential appeal of the characters’ feelings and sensations. In the Bacchae, I regard Dionysus’ action as an affective force that spreads throughout the world of the play, cracks, and mutates things, including human and animal bodies, natural elements, and objects. This action creates an enmeshment between things, which is embodied by the thyrsus topped with Pentheus’ head (mask) that gives the spectators a keen sense of the multiple, productive, and transformative nature of Dionysus’ power. In conclusion, this study argues that bodies, landscapes, and objects represent the privileged sites for exploring the affective exchange between the characters and the audience, refining our understanding of the intensity, impact, and reception of the Euripidean theater.

A parallel can be drawn in intellectual development between ancient Greece and late eighteenth century Europe concerning the secularization of the religious myth. This parallel is illustrated in a literary mode in Greece and in a philosophical mode in Europe. In both historical situations the intellectual development of a society was posited in a delicate balance of religious mythical interpretation of human existence and in a growing assertiveness of the self-consciousness of the individual. A significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods and Hegel’s formulation of a philosophy which suspended in a delicate semantic balance the religious terminology of his Christian heritage and the intellectual developments of the preceding century. It is my thesis that a significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods, and Hegel’s formulation of a philosophy which suspended in a delicate semantic balance the religious terminology of his Christian heritage and the intellectual developments of the preceding century.

This thesis traces the revival of Senecan tragedy from 1570 to the end of the sixteenth century through some of the earlier translations, adaptations, and imitations, and to evaluate the significance of the final evolution of such works into the Elizabethan tragedy of revenge.

No description available.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-281) and indexes.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-281) and indexes.

Habiltation--Universität, Stuttgart. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 425-464).

This dissertation explores the intersection between three different literary genres – historiography, tragedy, and epic poetry – in the neoclassical period, taking as its central problem the way said genres set out to represent strange and even unintelligible moments in the past. It is based on a case study of four canonical works that, contrary to what is expected of neoclassical literature, represent historical figures seen by audiences of the time as too disturbing or too farcical to be intellectually or artistically “useful”: the violent Roman hero Horace (the protagonist of Corneille’s eponymous tragedy), the Swedish king Charles XII (who anchors Voltaire’s first historical biography) and finally Joan of Arc (who appears in Voltaire’s comical epic La Pucelle d’Orléans, and in Schiller’s tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orléans). In exploring these texts, I set out to show that, while neoclassical poetics deeply emphasized the importance of representing the past in a plausible and dignified manner (be it in histories or in poetry), authors of the time were also aware that the past could be the domain of the uncanny and the fabulous, and that representing the implausible required different kinds of textual experimentation and different ways of playing with genre norms.

In this study, I challenge previous assumptions on Thucydides’ silence on gender in the History in order to understand this erasure as a central component of the historian’s attempt at asserting authorial control over a narrative of crisis. My project investigates the gendered strategies employed by Attic tragedy and historiography to represent defiant speakers – characters who challenge traditional speech, like Antigone or the Corcyreans, or those who speak ambiguously, like Cassandra and Alcibiades – in the context of 5th century Athens. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of the relationship between Thucydidean historiography and drama, my project presents a theoretical reorientation of how the two genres can and should be read in parallel. Methodologically, I integrate close readings with the insights afforded by Anne Carson’s creative engagements with antiquity in order to analyze how gender structures the meaning-making systems in these narratives. Following a chronotropic trajectory, this dissertation investigates how gender refracts through the ways in which the tragedians and Thucydides represent issues of time, space and place, and perception; it then ends by returning to time to offer a critical re-evaluation of the receptions and afterlives of Greek tragedy and history. Ultimately, this study offers a methodology that helps us model a parallel reading of Attic tragedy and Thucydidean historiography; not in order to “test out” the historicity of tragedy against Thucydides’ account, but rather to use tragedy to fill the gap of gender in the History. Probing this dialogue – a dialogue informed as much by silence and omission as by contact and shared vocabulary – among ancient and modern, tragic and historiographic, originary and receptive models of literary entanglement challenges us to rethink the political potential of transgressive speakers within canonical narratives, and to reflect on the role that gender has in shaping these discursive tensions.