Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama

Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama PDF Author: Alexandra Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198887248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Despite the crucial roles they often play, no study yet compares the off-stage assemblies, armies, and populations found in surviving Athenian dramatic works. Covering fifth- and early fourth-century tragedy and comedy, Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama analyses how off-stage groups influence and respond to events on stage, and how characters interact with these groups. Drama exploits these groups' off-stage nature by depicting them through different characters' viewpoints: characters often struggle to define, predict, or control off-stage groups, which obscures and challenges the audience's ability to interpret them. The interaction between multivalent and sometimes contradictory narratives of off-stage groups demands a new interpretive framework. Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama provides this framework, offering new readings of several prominent comedies and tragedies. However, the importance of this framework extends beyond drama. The first chapter surveys depictions of group decision-making in fifth-century prose, in order to demonstrate how Athenian drama responds to prose depictions of group psychology. Athenian drama engages with the early ideas of group psychology circulating in fifth- and early fourth-century Athens; it creates fictive worlds where stereotypical depictions of collective emotion can be probed, explored and taken to their logical extremes. Studying off-stage groups therefore allows us to rethink our understanding of narrative, politics, and social psychology in drama, and the ways in which these fields intersect.

Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama

Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama PDF Author: Alexandra Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198887248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Despite the crucial roles they often play, no study yet compares the off-stage assemblies, armies, and populations found in surviving Athenian dramatic works. Covering fifth- and early fourth-century tragedy and comedy, Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama analyses how off-stage groups influence and respond to events on stage, and how characters interact with these groups. Drama exploits these groups' off-stage nature by depicting them through different characters' viewpoints: characters often struggle to define, predict, or control off-stage groups, which obscures and challenges the audience's ability to interpret them. The interaction between multivalent and sometimes contradictory narratives of off-stage groups demands a new interpretive framework. Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama provides this framework, offering new readings of several prominent comedies and tragedies. However, the importance of this framework extends beyond drama. The first chapter surveys depictions of group decision-making in fifth-century prose, in order to demonstrate how Athenian drama responds to prose depictions of group psychology. Athenian drama engages with the early ideas of group psychology circulating in fifth- and early fourth-century Athens; it creates fictive worlds where stereotypical depictions of collective emotion can be probed, explored and taken to their logical extremes. Studying off-stage groups therefore allows us to rethink our understanding of narrative, politics, and social psychology in drama, and the ways in which these fields intersect.

Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama

Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama PDF Author: Alexandra Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198887221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama analyses how off-stage groups in fifth- and early fourth-century tragedy and comedy influence and respond to events on stage, and how characters interact with these groups. Alexandra Hardwick argues that Athenian drama engages with early ideas of group psychology, providing ways to explore collective emotion.

Rehearsals of Manhood

Rehearsals of Manhood PDF Author: John J. Winkler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691206481
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"When John J. Winkler died in 1990, he left a substantially complete manuscript containing the final version of the project he had undertaken in the last decade of his life: an original interpretation of the development and meaning of ancient Greek drama. That manuscript was based on The Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College, which Winkler delivered in September of 1988. The present text has been edited and updated by classicists David Halperin, Winkler's literary executor, and Kirk Ormand, Winkler's student and an expert on Greek drama. Rehearsals of Manhood, the final work of a widely recognized and celebrated classical scholar, proposes an entirely new account of Greek drama providing an explanation of the social place of Greek drama and its relation to the gendered organization of Athenian social life. Winkler interprets drama as a secular manhood ritual, a public aesthetic undertaking focused on the initiation of boys into manhood and, specifically, on the training, the display, and the representation of young male warriors. According to Winkler, the chorus of both tragedy and comedy was composed of young Athenian men of citizen status, about eighteen to twenty years of age, who were undergoing military training in order to prepare themselves for the task of warfare; they danced on a rectangular dance floor in a rectangular formation that recalled the arrangement of the infantry phalanx; they accompanied plays that often highlighted scenarios of risk faced by young men on the verge of adulthood; and they performed in a theater whose seating was arranged to display the corporate body of the male citizenry as a whole, both its democratic equality and its hierarchical ranking according to degrees of excellence. Winkler does not offer new interpretations of the texts of Greek plays but a new account of how the very practice of dramatic performance fit into the social life and gender politics of the Athenian state"--

Nothing to Do with Dionysos?

Nothing to Do with Dionysos? PDF Author: John J. Winkler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691215898
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
These critically diverse and innovative essays are aimed at restoring the social context of ancient Greek drama. Theatrical productions, which included music and dancing, were civic events in honor of the god Dionysos and were attended by a politically stratified community, whose delegates handled all details from the seating arrangements to the qualifications of choral competitors. The growing complexity of these performances may have provoked the Athenian saying "nothing to do with Dionysos" implying that theater had lost its exclusive focus on its patron. This collection considers how individual plays and groups of dramas pertained to the concerns of the body politic and how these issues were presented in the convention of the stage and as centerpieces of civic ceremonies. The contributors, in addition to the editors, include Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Franois Lissarrague, Oddone Longo, Nicole Loraux, Josiah Ober, Ruth Padel, James Redfield, Niall W. Slater, Barry Strauss, and Jesper Svenbro.

The Attic Theatre

The Attic Theatre PDF Author: Arthur Elam Haigh
Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press
ISBN:
Category : Greek drama
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description


The Attic Theatre

The Attic Theatre PDF Author: Arthur Elam Haigh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Athens (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description


Nothing to Do with Dionysos?

Nothing to Do with Dionysos? PDF Author: John J. Winkler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691068145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
These critically diverse and innovative essays are aimed at restoring the social context of ancient Greek drama. Theatrical productions, which included music and dancing, were civic events in honor of the god Dionysos and were attended by a politically stratified community, whose delegates handled all details from the seating arrangements to the qualifications of choral competitors. The growing complexity of these performances may have provoked the Athenian saying "nothing to do with Dionysos" implying that theater had lost its exclusive focus on its patron. This collection considers how individual plays and groups of dramas pertained to the concerns of the body politic and how these issues were presented in the convention of the stage and as centerpieces of civic ceremonies. The contributors, in addition to the editors, include Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Franois Lissarrague, Oddone Longo, Nicole Loraux, Josiah Ober, Ruth Padel, James Redfield, Niall W. Slater, Barry Strauss, and Jesper Svenbro.

Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre

Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre PDF Author: Peter D. Arnott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134924038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Peter Arnott discusses Greek drama not as an antiquarian study but as a living art form. He removes the plays from the library and places them firmly in the theatre that gave them being. Invoking the practical realities of stagecraft, he illuminates the literary patterns of the plays, the performance disciplines, and the audience responses. Each component of the productions - audience, chorus, actors, costume, speech - is examined in the context of its own society and of theatre practice in general, with examples from other cultures. Professor Arnott places great emphasis on the practical staging of Greek plays, and how the buildings themselves imposed particular constraints on actors and writers alike. Above all, he sets out to make practical sense of the construction of Greek plays, and their organic relationship to their original setting.

Crisis on Stage

Crisis on Stage PDF Author: Andreas Markantonatos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110271567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
This volume explores the relationships between masterworks of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes and critical events of Athenian history, by bringing together internationally distinguished scholars with expertise on different aspects of ancient theatre. These specialists study how tragic and comic plays composed in late fifth century BCE mirror the acute political and social crisis unfolding in Athens in the wake of the military catastrophe in 413 BCE and the oligarchic revolution in 411 BCE. With events of such magnitude the late fifth century held the potential for vast and fast cultural and intellectual change. In times of severe emergency humans gain a more conscious understanding of their historically shaped presence; this realization often has a welcome effect of offering new perspectives to tackle future challenges. Over twenty academic experts believe that the Attic theatre showed increased responsiveness to the pressing social and political issues of the day to the benefit of the polis. By regularly promoting examples of public-spirited and capable figures of authority, Greek drama provided the people of Athens with a civic understanding of their own good.

Tragedy Offstage

Tragedy Offstage PDF Author: Rachel Hall Sternberg
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029277348X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves? In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.