Euripides’ Phoenissae is a challenging work that is often overlooked by scholars of Greek drama. This study analyzes how the concept of autochthony occupies a central thematic concern of the play. On the one hand, autochthony unites humans to soil, political claims to myths, and present to past. On the other hand, autochthony was often invoked to exclude foreigners, women and exiles from political life at Athens. We observe a similar dichotomy in the Phoenissae. Autochthony unites the episode action–the story of the fraternal conflict—with the very different subject matter of the choral odes, which treat the founding myths of Thebes. By focalizing the lyric material through the perspective of marginalized female voices (Antigone and the chorus), Euripides is able to problematize the myths and rhetoric associated with autochthony. At the same time, Antigone’s departure with her father at the play’s close offers a transformation of autochthonous power into a positive religious entity. I suggest that a careful examination of the many facets of autochthony can inform our understanding of the Phoenissae with respect to dramatic structure, apparent Euripidean innovations, character motivation, stage direction and audience reception. / text

Title supplied by cataloguer from accompanying Statement of submission. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 451-467) and index. / Has accompanying Statement of submission letter and application for candidature which includes a list of other publications by the author and details of works proposed for the submission. / 2 v. : / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Published texts submitted for doctorate are in French. / Thesis (D.Litt.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of European Studies and Linguistics, 2006

Based on author's thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-238) and index.

Title supplied by cataloguer from accompanying Statement of submission. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 451-467) and index. / Has accompanying Statement of submission letter and application for candidature which includes a list of other publications by the author and details of works proposed for the submission. / 2 v. : / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Published texts submitted for doctorate are in French. / Thesis (D.Litt.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of European Studies and Linguistics, 2006

Orientador: Suzi Frankl Sperber / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T08:54:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Closel_RegisAugustusBars_M.pdf: 2038312 bytes, checksum: 7c1b1af36416b37e4e7597571df3f57d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: A presente dissertação tem por objetivo propor um diálogo entre duas obras dramáticas de grande significância, Ricardo III e As Troianas, no cânone de seus autores, respectivamente, William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) e Lucius Annaeus Sêneca (4 a.C - 65 d.C). A premissa inicial é a relação tradicional entre ambos, que atribui ao tragediógrafo elisabetano uma influência textual, temática e estilística originária do filósofo e tragediógrafo latino. Para o estudo dessas relações, limitadas ao escopo de duas obras, o trabalho foi dividido em três partes. No primeiro capítulo é realizado um percurso sobre toda a historiografia da crítica da influência que Sêneca teria exercido sobre os dramaturgos que escreveram durante a segunda metade do século XVI, na Inglaterra. Observa-se, principalmente, como a visão e a metodologia de se tratar o tema da influência se altera, ao longo dos anos, chegando, por exemplo, a ser negada por alguns críticos durante certo tempo, além da observação do delineamento do próprio objeto. Toma-se o cuidado, durante todo o trabalho de não fazer opção a favor ou negar a presença de Sêneca para não incorrer em extremismos. No segundo capítulo, busca-se, com base nos resultados do primeiro capítulo, a leitura histórica dos elementos temáticos e estilísticos lidos como derivados de ou influenciados por Sêneca. Neste ponto o foco distancia-se do campo de discussão crítica do fenômeno para o campo de crítica histórico-literária e os objetos focados, agora, são exatamente aqueles que anteriormente foram levantados como ?"senequianos". No terceiro capítulo, conhecida a história da influência e tendo sido feita uma gama de opções e leituras sobre a época de Shakespeare, inicia-se a leitura das duas obras. Tal abordagem preambular se fez necessária para que houvesse um embasamento tanto da crítica da discussão da influência, como da leitura histórica da cultura que produziu Ricardo III. Foi feita a opção de seguir com a leitura de René Girard sobre os conceitos de Teoria Mimética e Crise de Diferenças, pois tocam em noções basilares do mundo Elisabetano, apresentando, portanto, uma atmosfera na qual os diálogos poderiam situar relações de aproximação e afastamento entre a dupla de obras escolhida. Observa-se uma leitura mítica, muito rica politicamente, ao trabalhar com a história/mito conhecidos por ambas as obras / Abstract: This dissertation aims to propose a dialogue between two dramatic works of great importance, Richard III and Trojan Women, both canonic for their authors, respectively, William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) and Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD). The initial premise is the traditional relationship between them, which presupposes that the Elizabethan tragedies have textual, thematic and stylistic influence of the Latin philosopher and tragedian. In order to study these relationships, restricted to the scope of the two referred plays, the dissertation was divided into three parts. The first chapter is about Seneca's influence on playwrights who wrote along the second half of the sixteenth century in England. It focuses mainly the vision and methodology used to study the issue of influence and changes of views over the years, reaching, for example, the fact that the influence was denied by some critics for some time. It also observes the outline of the object - the relation between plays - itself. Along these considerations, I was aware that I should not propose or deny the influence of Seneca in order not to incur in extremism. The second chapter, based on the results of the first chapter, seeks to read the historical interpretation of stylistic and thematic elements as derived from or influenced by Seneca. At this point, the analysis moves away from the critical discussion to approach the field of historical and literary criticism. The focused objects are exactly those that have previously been raised as "senequians", like the blank verse, the tyrant and the presence of ghosts. In the third chapter begins the interpretation of both tragedies. This preliminary approach was necessary in order to have a critical foundation for the discussion of influence, as that one produced by historical reading of Richard III. The mimetic theory of René Girard and the Crisis of Differences offered fundamental notions for the Elizabethan world, which presented interlocution between both tragedies, so that it was possible to examine approaches and distances between the two chosen plays. It was observed a very rich mythical and political relation among the plays using the known versions of history/myth / Mestrado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

This dissertation claims contributions on two fronts. First, it aims to contribute to the theory of reception with a practical model of reading postclassical texts that substantially engage ancient ones. In the second place, it contributes three individual readings of three important works of literature on which nothing has been written by anglophone classicists working on classical reception: José Watanabe’s Antígona, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. This dissertation’s contribution to the theory of reception is the proposition of a practical schema of reading, which is a figure upon which the imagination can operate. Simply put, it posits a schema as the place where meaning is construed. The schema calls attention to the constructedness of meaning and to the act of construction and organizes different moments of “reception”: that of the postclassical text receiving the ancient one (which the schema imagines as a vertical line) and that of the scholar receiving that particular instance of reception, the “I” of interpretation, which is theorized as one of two axes of transcendence of the schema (the other one being the world of/to which the schema speaks and means). Furthermore, the schema puts the “where” of meaning in the relation of (at least) two texts, but the “of” of meaning belongs to the postclassical texts. The postclassical text receiving ancient text(s) is proposed as a complex work, simultaneously in relationship with texts from the past as well as other texts from other periods. The relations of the postclassical text with each of these texts are different and need to be differently traced or theorized. The relation with the ancient texts is properly textual and thus the primary way of tracing it in the schema is a vertical line that first and foremost pays attention to form, with the tools of structural analysis and philology. Then, the theorization of the vertical line is made thicker with the operation of concepts upon it. As each of these texts (the classical and the postclassical) mean in relation to webs of texts that are relevant to the vertical relation, the schema imagines an additional dimension to the vertical one: the horizontal. Each of the horizontal lines traced for both the classical and the postclassical texts are in one way or another “historicist” readings, they trace contexts for the texts, but the way that context is understood in the theorization of the horizontal dimension of the schema is plural and never saturated. While this horizontal aspect of meaning is understood as textual, the schema also imagines for it an axis of transcendence, the world on which writers write and in which the reader is situated. The first chapter’s primary goal is to provide a reading of José Watanabe’s Antígona using the schema to illuminate the ways in which this text makes meaning in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone and part of the body of texts that have come to form part of that name. This reading counters the predominant approach to this work (and to many a work in classical reception), which reads it allegorically, as a commentary on a particular moment in the history of Peru. That predominant way of reading not only ignores the vertical orientation of the text in relation to its avowed ancient source, it also limits itself to one way of tracing the horizontality of the postclassical text, construing “context” in the most immediate and literal sense. The chapter contributes a reading that opens up Antígona to much more than allegory, highlighting its powerful affective and aesthetic dimension, as well as its intersection with recent feminist readings of the Greek tragedy that turn towards the figure of Ismene and the politics of sisterhood. The second chapter sets itself to the analysis of the complex role that ancient texts play in Christine Brooke-Rose’s radically experimental novel Amalgamemnon. This novel has not been the focus of attention of any work by a classical scholar, and those scholars who have written about it in other fields have failed to analyze the importance that Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon play at both the structural and the thematic levels. Tracing the vertical line, the chapter shows how these two texts are essential to the novel’s writing and themes. In the horizontal dimension, the schema situates the novel’s engagement with those ancient sources in the context of contemporary feminist discourse, especially as it concerns the question of the possibility of a feminine discourse and an outside of the phallocentric system of signs. That intersection illuminates both how Brooke-Rose is reading the ancient sources as well as what are arguably some of the limitations of her writing in contrast to the ethical commitments of feminisms. Finally, the third chapter is a reading of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, a text that is perhaps better known than the texts treated in the previous two chapters, at least in the Anglophone world, but which has nonetheless been fairly disregarded in the scholarship. The chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the “work” of this text, of what it does and how it does it, as the scholarship on Carson’s work has failed to posit or satisfactorily respond to the important questions regarding what constitutes the undeniable originality of her writing. In this particular book, which combines academic and poetic discourses into a new form that partakes of both, Carson proposes a comparative mode of making meaning that cannot be captured with a structural analysis of inter- or -trans- textuality, as the previous two chapters construed the vertical dimension of the schema. Instead, the theory of metaphor developed by Paul Ricoeur provides the appropriate tool to imagine the vertical dimension of the schema and analyze Carson’s exercise in bringing an ancient and a modern author together. This particular construction of the schema brings into the terrain of classical reception the possibility of interpretating comparative works that do not fit nicely within the theoretical margins of this subfield of classical studies. Finally, the chapter provides the occasion to trace another aspect of the schema, its other axis of transcendence, which is the “I” of interpretation.

This thesis looks at occurrences of "living death" – a liminal state that exists between life and death, and which may be approached from either side – in early modern English drama. Today, reference to the living dead brings to mind zombies and their ilk, creatures which entered the English language and imagination centuries after the time of the great early modern playwrights. Yet, I argue, many post-Reformation writers were imagining states between life and death in ways more complex than existing critical discussions of “ghosts” have tended to perceive. My approach to the subject is broadly historicist, but informed throughout by ideas of stagecraft and performance. In addition to presenting fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) and John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), I also endeavour to shed new light on various non-canon works such as the anonymous The Tragedy of Locrine (c.1591), John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (c.1602), and Anthony Munday's mayoral pageants Chruso-thriambos (1611) and Chrysanaleia (1616), works which have received little in the way of serious scholarly attention or, in the case of Antonio's Revenge, been much maligned by critics. These dramatic works depict a whole host of the living dead, including not only ghosts and spirits but also resurrected Lord Mayors, corpses which continue to “perform” after death, and characters who anticipate their deaths or define themselves through last dying speeches. By exploring the significance of these characters, I demonstrate that the concept of living death is vital to our understanding of deeper thematic and symbolic meanings in a wide range of dramatic works.

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.