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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-205).

My thesis examines the evolution of Clytemnestra’s characterization throughout the generations of receptions of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. This diachronic study investigates how Clytemnestra’s complex use of gender, specifically her use of masculinity, allows her character to be understood in a different light by a modern audience in contrast to the original perception of her character in antiquity. In analysing the aspects that contribute to Clytemnestra’s ancient characterization, which display her to be dangerously masculine to a fifth-century male audience, the meaning behind her behaviour is also revealed, as it opens a discussion on masculinity in Athens through Clytemnestra’s emasculation of the men around her. The true depth of her character is revealed through a study of Clytemnestra’s modern characterization, as modern audiences are able to recognize the sympathetic aspects of her character in the text, which are reflected through the various feminist adaptations and performances today. The paradox of Clytemnestra’s characterization demonstrates the impact that she has not only on the plot of the play, but also on its survival, as her complexity is what continues to engage audiences in modernity. The findings of this thesis will demonstrate the importance of female characters in Greek tragedy through examining the various layers of Clytemnestra’s character that are uncovered by comparing her characterization in antiquity and modernity, thus proving that her figure, and tragedy overall, has the ability to evolve and influence audiences yet to come through the impact of these dynamic women. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Orientador: Flavio Ribeiro de Oliveira / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-17T13:28:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Salvador_EvandroLuis_D.pdf: 724657 bytes, checksum: 33f856b8879463095c8d1581fd848ecc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Resumo: Destinada ao público não especializado na questão da poesia dramática grega, a pesquisa de doutorado tem como foco principal a tradução em prosa da tragédia As Fenícias, de Eurípides. Apresenta-se, também, um ensaio sobre o prólogo e o primeiro episódio, possibilitando aos leitores da tragédia compreender um aspecto por vezes esquecido, mas que é fundamental para a sua dramatização: a audiência teatral. Desse modo, pretende-se construir uma ponte entre o mundo grego antigo e o mundo do leitor moderno / Abstract: Not specialized for the public on the issue of Greek dramatic poetry, the doctoral research is focused on the translation in prose of the Euripides' tragedy Phoenissae. It presents also an essay on the prologue and the first episode, which enable readers to understand an aspect of tragedy that is sometimes forgotten, but that is essencial for its enactment: the theatrical audience. Thus, we intend to build a bridge between the ancient Greek world and the world of the modern reader / Doutorado / Linguistica / Doutor em Linguística

This practice-led thesis explores ways in which to integrate art and material culture studies as a manifestation of philosophy’s process thread. In doing so, its goal is to generate a praxis which is able to come to holistic terms with the fragmenting dualism of subject-object binaries. By seizing my own subjectivity in its representation of this problem, the thesis develops a performance-led practice which seeks to overcome the barriers that its divisive ‘I’ presents to process. This interdisciplinary project is an explicit response to the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche; his bearing helps to constitute its methodology and repertoire as his presence is creatively teased from the pages of his own books. Part One of the thesis discusses how the mimetic aims of artistic representation were harnessed to challenge my own subjectivity’s singular sense of authority. Thereafter, Nietzsche’s pre-modern temperament comes to enable a holistic consideration of the perceptual ambiguity within Jacques Lacan’s geometric model of ‘seeing things’. Part Two engages with representation as a method of making difference for the bridging of subject-object divisions. This occurs as subjective experience and is extended to some inorganic others, producing creative outcomes which aim to access a cosmological principle of affect that is identified with Nietzsche’s thesis of will to power. The third part of this thesis aligns the research aim, of making apparent the oneness of the cosmos, with the shamanic dimensions of some vintage slapstick cinema. In its development, it comes to terms with the subjective gaze and identifies process-led strategies for challenging and changing its outlooks. This provides a background for Part Four, which marks the beginning of my attempts to engage the gaze of other people in processes that procure and ideally affect their perspectives. While the first four parts of the thesis demonstrate the progress of the research project through the deployment of art and its affecting capacities, its final two parts put the work of philosophy into aesthetic effects, and represent artworks that constitute elements of the thesis itself. Part Five evidences my art practice re-engaging with the world through a project which holistically involves the outlooks of subjects, whilst nevertheless challenging their perceptual precepts. Part Six discusses a performative experiment that consolidates and tests the research findings in a potentially affective structure, expressed through Laurence Halprin’s RSVP cycle. Finally, as it reflects on the potential healing capacities of my practical research and the possibilities for ‘doing’ philosophy, the thesis details how an art-making that embraces both visual and material cultures through the eventness of performance might be able to overcome the problematic perceptual divides that limit the progress of process logics.

Notre thèse se penche sur les tragédies créées entre la retraite professionnelle de Racine (1677) et l’amorce d’un renouvellement de la poétique tragique vers les années 1730, marquées par une interruption des carrières de Crébillon et de La Motte, la publication, notamment, des Discours de ce dernier et du Théâtre des Grecs du Père Brumoy, et le retour d’Angleterre du jeune Voltaire. Nous y interrogeons dans un premier temps la sclérose qui gagne la scène et la poétique tragiques en rapport avec les premiers essais de définition de l’élégie, qui mettent en évidence la porosité des deux genres, et un retour en force de l’esthétique de l’horreur occasionnée par la concurrence directe entre la Comédie-Française et le succès des tragédies lyriques du Palais-Royal. Nous étendons ensuite nos conclusions à l’étude des composantes poétiques et dramaturgiques des tragédies de l’époque, où nous analysons les inflexions élégiaques et horrifiques qui se dégagent des effets de structure dus à des interprétations opposées de la notion de simplicité ; dans la même perspective, nous examinons les inflexions qui gagnent la typologie des personnages et les rapports entre les intrigues amoureuse et politique. Enfin, nous abordons le rôle des motifs élégiaques et horrifiques dans la recherche de l’effet tragique, plus particulièrement en ce qui concerne les larmes et l’effroi, ainsi que la transposition sur la scène française du modèle antique des Héroïdes, où ces deux tendances sont réunies. / This thesis investigates tragedies written between Racine’s retirement (1677) and the beginnings of a renewal of the poetics of tragedy in the 1730s, a period marked by the interruption of the careers of Crébillon and La Motte, the publication of La Motte’s Discours and Père Brumoy’s Le Théâtre des Grecs as well as young Voltaire’s return from England. First, it examines the ossification of the theatre and the poetics of tragedy in connection with early attempts to define the genre of elegy that highlight the porosity of the two genres, along with a revival of the aesthetics of horror arising from direct competition between the Comédie-Française and the successful lyrical tragedies of the Palais-Royal. Conclusions are subsequently applied to a study of the poetic and dramaturgical components of the era’s tragedies, based on an analysis of the modulations of elegy and horror that emerge from structural effects created by conflicting interpretations of the concept of simplicity. The modulations that permeate the character typology and the relationships between political plots and love plots are then analyzed from the same angle. Lastly, the thesis concludes with an exploration of the role of the motifs of horror and elegy in the pursuit of tragic effect, more specifically with regard to tears and fright, and the adaptation of the ancient model of the Heroïdes for French theatre, in which these two trends are combined.

This essay aims to understand the relationship between Shakespeare’s poetical formula, which is Hamlet´s claim that “time is out of joint” and Kant’s positioning of time (and space) based on Deleuze’s conception in Sur quatre formules poétiques qui pourraient résumerla philosophie kantienne from 1986. I explore this relationship in the way of how Deleuze relates it to the entanglement between time and movement. With Kant, time becomes purely formal and it has unrolled itself into a pure “straight line” that is all the more mysterious for being simple. The consequences of this new Kantian definition of time are tremendous: the ancient cosmological harmony between the world and the heavens, man and the heavenly gods have broken down. Time has ceased to be an image of the eternal order and time has ceased to be curved by God. When time has shaken off its subordination to the periodical movements of planets it is out of joint, and in order to see how that time operates I will relate it to the temporality within tragic drama.

The thesis explores the development of Shakespeare’s political ideas, in particular his exploration of authority, and the legitimacy of resistance towards it, in the two English history tetralogies (as well as the self-contained history, King John), and examines the ways in which this protracted engagement with the question of kingship – and governance more generally – informs his turn to tragedy towards the end of the 1590s. The thesis argues that criticism has tended to downplay the importance of the first tetralogy in the Shakespeare canon (particularly the Henry VI plays), and as a corollary it has overlooked the important continuities that can be traced from Shakespeare’s earliest engagement with politics to his treatment of power in Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The thesis sees the history plays as essentially paradoxical and ambivalent. Shakespeare presents the past as both a shining example to which each succeeding generation must aspire, but also as a legacy which they are powerless to fulfil, while he treats the dynastic conflicts of the Houses of York and Lancaster as essentially intractable, with each new pretender to the throne – however legitimate his claim – undermined by a host of legal, moral, and pragmatic considerations. It is a central contention of the thesis that it was Shakespeare’s failure satisfactorily to resolve the intractable political conflicts of the first tetralogy which prompted him to confront a similar set of questions in King John, before returning to them yet again in the more highly acclaimed second tetralogy. The thesis concludes by arguing that far from representing a breach with his history plays, the tragedies are continuous with them. So rather than identifying the ‘origins’ of Hamlet either in Shakespeare’s reaction to the fall of Essex or the death of his son, Hammet, in 1596, it is more persuasive to see the play as arising from the debates and problems which were initially addressed in the first tetralogy.

This thesis explores the intersection between the study of Shakespearean drama and the theory and practice of early modern dramatic genres. It reassesses the significance of tragedy and the idea of the tragic within three separate yet related generic frames: tragedy, history, and tragicomedy. Behind this research lies the fundamental question of how newly emerging dramatic genres allow Shakespeare to explore tragedy within different aesthetic and dramatic contexts, and of how they allow his writing to move beyond tragedy. The thesis begins by looking at Shakespeare’s deployment of the complex trope of “nothing”. “Nothing” as a rhetorical trope and metaphysical idea appears across many of the tragedies, often becoming a focal point for the dramatic representation of scepticism, loss and nihilism. The trope is often associated with the space of the theatre, and sometimes with the dramaturgy of tragedy itself. However, it is also deployed within the histories and tragicomedies at certain moments which might equally be called tragic. “Nothing” therefore provides a starting-point for thinking about how the genres of history and tragicomedy engage with tragedy. Part I focuses on tragedy, including extended readings of Timon of Athens and King Lear. It explores Shakespearean drama as a response to the pressures of the early modern cultural preoccupation with, and anxiety about, scepticism. Stanley Cavell and other critics of early modern dramatic scepticism have tended to locate this engagement with scepticism within tragedy. However, this section shows that the same sceptical problematic is addressed across Shakespearean dramatic genres, with very different results. It then explores why scepticism should display a particular affinity for tragedy as a dramatic genre. Part II focuses on history, with particular reference to Richard II and Henry V. The trope of “nothing” is used as a starting-point to explore the intersection between Shakespearean history and tragedy. Engaging with Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque tragedy as Trauerspiel (mourning-plays) rooted in history, it argues that Trauerspiel provides a useful generic framework against which to consider the mournful aesthetic of Shakespeare’s histories. Part III focuses on early modern tragicomedy and The Winter’s Tale, asking how Shakespeare achieves the transition from tragedy to tragicomedy in his later writing. It explores tragicomedy’s background on the early modern stage in theory and practice, paying particular attention to Guarini’s theory that pastoral tragicomedy frees its hearers from melancholy, and to the legacy of medieval religious drama and its engagement with faith and belief. Returning to the trope of “nothing”, this section shows that The Winter’s Tale addresses the same sceptical problematic as the earlier tragedies. Arguing that scepticism opens up a space for tragedy and nihilism in the first half of The Winter’s Tale, it demonstrates that Shakespeare finds in the genre of tragicomedy an aesthetic and dramatic form which allows him to move through, and beyond, the claims of tragedy.

Depuis la nuit des temps, le sujet se pose à lui-même la question de savoir ce qui il est. Chercher une parole pour la haine était une façon de mettre en évidence, au cœur de cette passion (la passion de la haine), l’être parlant, sa fatalité et sa révolte. Les hommes de la Grèce antique ont répondu par le mythe. Dans cette tentative de représenter la question des origines et de l’impossible, ils ont intégré la haine. La haine surgit comme un reste provenant de temps immémoriaux, elle est liée à la rencontre de l’humain avec le langage et, également, au mouvement qui l’éloigne de l’Autre, lieu du langage, pour prendre le risque de devenir sujet du désir. Il s’agit de repérer la haine et ses fonctions dans la subjectivité : cela implique de prendre en compte les façons adoptées par le sujet pour penser et traiter le réel auquel il a affaire. Le mythe et la tragédie, mettant en récit les pires violences (le matricide, l’inceste, le cannibalisme, l’infanticide, le parricide, le meurtre, le massacre), situent une haine qui peut, ainsi que les récits le présentent, se déchaîner si elle n’est pas traitée par le symbolique. Les crimes semblent ignorer l’écoulement des siècles, ils se répètent inlassablement, et la haine reste une compagne constante des positions du sujet face à son destin. Or, si le sujet maintient sa quête d’explication des pulsions destructrices qui l’occupent, et s’il tente toujours d’énoncer comment sa subjectivité se tient avec l’époque qui l’accueille, il ne peut pas faire appel au mythe, ni à un quelconque discours de portée universelle reconnaissant ses solutions singulières pour traiter sa propre altérité. Face à un discours qui cherche à « enterrer » le sujet de la parole, au fondement de la civilisation et du lien social, la littérature et l’art prennent le relais et proposent des représentations susceptibles « d’entourer » la passion haineuse, et de mobiliser le sujet du désir. La psychanalyse répond, de son côté, par la prise en considération des solutions singulières et de la responsabilité éthique, tant du clinicien que de l’analysant, dans leur maintien, leur restauration, leur changement. / Since the dawn of time, the subject has wondered about what he is. Looking for a hate speech was a way to highlight the speaking being, his fate and his rebellion, in the center of this passion (the passion of hate). Men from Ancient Greece responded through myth. In their attempt to represent the question of the origins and of the impossible, they integrated hate. Hate arises like remnants from immemorial time; it is linked to human encounter with language and with movement separating it away from the Other, the place of language, in order to take the risk of becoming the subject of desire. Tracing hate and its functions in subjectivity: this implies to take into account the ways adopted by the subject to think and deal with real. Myth and tragedy, taking into account the worst human violence (matricide, incest, cannibalism, infanticide, parricide, murder, massacre), put into place a hate that can, as tales depict it, lash out if it is not treated by the symbolic. Crimes seem to ignore the flow of centuries and are repeated endlessly, and hate remains a constant companion of the positions of the subject facing his destiny. However, if the subject maintains his quest to explain the destructive impulses that occupy him, and if he always tries to state how his subjectivity is held together with the age in which he lives, he cannot appeal to myth, nor to any speech of universal scope acknowledging his own singular solutions to deal with his own alterity. Facing a discourse attempting to "bury" the subject of speech, at the foundation of civilization and of social ties, literature and art take over and offer performances which can "surround" the hateful passion, and mobilize the subject of desire. Psychoanalysis responds, in turn, by the consideration of singular solutions and ethical responsibility of the clinician and the analysand, in their maintenance, restoration and changes.