Download or read book Visualizing the Tragic written by Chris Kraus and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-06-07 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that brings new insight to the question of the continuing, and inexhaustible, fascination of Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE. There is particular reference to the visual - the myriad ways in which tragic texts are (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and (re)visualized through verbal and artistic description.
Download or read book Visualizing the invisible with the human body written by J. Cale Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.
Download or read book The Music of Tragedy written by Naomi A. Weiss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.
Download or read book Tragic Bodies written by Nancy Worman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PROSE Award (2022) for Classics This book argues for a new way of reading tragedy that attends to how bodies in the ancient plays pivot between subject and object, person and thing, living and dead, and so serve as vehicles for confronting the edges of the human. At the same time, it explores the ways in which Greek tragedy pulls up close to human bodies, examining their physical edges, their surfaces and parts, their coverings or nakedness, and their postures and orientations. Drawing on and advancing the latest interplays of posthumanism and materialism in relation to classical literature, Nancy Worman shows how this tragic enactment may seem to emphasize the human body, but in effect does something quite different. Greek drama instead often treats the body as a thing that has the status and implications associated with other objects, such as a cloak, an urn, or a toy for a dog. Tragic Bodies urges attention to key scenes in Greek tragedy that foreground bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing. This occurs when signs with weighty symbolic resonance distil out on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and conflation orchestrated through proximity, contact, and sensory dynamics. Reading the dramatic script in this way pursues the felt knowledge at the body's edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration attuned to how bodies register at tragedy's unique intersections – where directive and figurative language combine to highlight visual, tactile, and aural details.
Download or read book Homer Iliad Book VI written by Homer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first commentary in English entirely devoted to the Iliad Book 6, illuminating some of the best-loved episodes in the whole poem.
Download or read book Theater of the People written by David Kawalko Roselli and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas created exclusively for themselves—a model that reduces theater to little more than a medium for propaganda. Women's theater attendance remains controversial, and little attention has been paid to the social class and ethnicity of the spectators. Whose theater was it? Producing the first book-length work on the subject, David Kawalko Roselli draws on archaeological and epigraphic evidence, economic and social history, performance studies, and ancient stories about the theater to offer a wide-ranging study that addresses the contested authority of audiences and their historical constitution. Space, money, the rise of the theater industry, and broader social forces emerge as key factors in this analysis. In repopulating audiences with foreigners, slaves, women, and the poor, this book challenges the basis of orthodox interpretations of Greek drama and places the politically and socially marginal at the heart of the theater. Featuring an analysis of the audiences of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, Theater of the People brings to life perhaps the most powerful influence on the most prominent dramatic poets of their day.
Download or read book Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry written by Lauren Curtis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new interpretation of Augustan literature, focusing on its imaginative reading of Greek musical culture.
Download or read book The Politics of Viewing in Xenophon s Historical Narratives written by Rosie Harman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers cultural identity and power relations in early fourth-century BCE Greece through a reading of Xenophon's historical narratives, the Hellenica, Anabasis and Cyropaedia. These texts depict conflicts between Greek states, conflicts between Greeks and non-Greeks, and relations between the elite individual and society. In all three texts, politically significant moments are imagined in visual terms. We witness spectacles of Spartan military victory, vistas of Asian landscape or displays of Persian imperial pomp, and historical protagonists are presented as spectators viewing and responding to events. Through this visual form of narration, the reader is encouraged imaginatively to place themselves in the position of the historical protagonists. In viewing events from different perspectives, and therefore occupying multiple, often conflicting political positions, the reader not only experiences the problems faced by historical actors, but becomes engaged in the political conflicts acted out in the narratives. The reader is prompted to take pleasure in the sight of Panhellenic achievement, but also to witness the divisions and conflicts between Greeks on class and ethnic lines. Similarly the reader is invited to identify with spectacular Greek and non-Greek figures of power as emblems of Greek imperial potential, but also to see through the eyes of those communities subjugated at their hands. The depiction of spectacles and spectators draws the reader into an active participation in the ideological contradictions of their time, in a period when Panhellenic aspiration co-existed with hegemonic competition between Greek states, and when Greeks could be both beneficiaries and victims of imperialism.
Download or read book Grief and the Hero written by Emily P. Austin and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grief and the Hero examines Achilles’ experience of the futility of grief in the context of the Iliad’s study of anger. No action can undo his friend Patroklos’ death, but the experience of death drives him to behave as though he can achieve something restorative. Rather than assuming that grief gives rise to anger, as most scholars have done, Grief and the Hero pays close attention to the poem’s representation of the origin of these emotions. In the Iliad, only Achilles’ grief for Patroklos is joined with the word pothê, “longing”; no other grief in the poem is described with this term. The Iliad depicts Achilles’ grief as the rupture of shared life—an insight that generates a new way of reading the epic. Achilles’ anguish drives him to extremes, oscillating between self-isolation and seeking communal expressions of grief; between weeping abundantly and relentlessly pursuing battle; between varied threats of mutilation, deeds of vengeance, and other vows. Yet his yearning for life shared with Patroklos is the common denominator. Here lies the profound insight of the Iliad. All of Achilles’ grief-driven deeds arise from his longing for life with Patroklos, and thus all of these deeds are, in a deep sense, futile. He yearns for something unattainable—undoing the reality of death. Grief and the Hero will appeal not only to scholars and students of Homer but to all humanists. Loss, longing, and even revenge touch many human lives, and the insights of the Iliad have broad resonance.
Download or read book Epic Visions written by Helen Lovatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary collection explores different ways of visualising Greek and Roman epic from Homer to Statius, in both ancient and modern culture. The book presents new perspectives on Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, and covers the re-working of epic matter in tragedy, opera, film, late antique speeches of praise, story-boarding, sculpture and wall-painting. The chapters use a variety of methods to address the relationship between narrative and visuality, exploring how and why epic has inspired artists, authors and directors, and offering fresh visual interpretations of epic texts. Themes and issues discussed include: intermediality, ekphrasis and panegyric, illusion and deception, imagery and deferral, alienation and involvement, the multiplicity of possible visual responses to texts, three-dimensionality, miniaturisation, epic as cultural capital, and the specificity of genres, both literary and visual.
Download or read book Vivid Rhetoric and Visual Persuasion written by Meghan Henning and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major scholarly collaboration exploring vivid visual rhetoric in the New Testament From Jesus’s miraculous walk on water to the graphic horrors of hell, New Testament authors make vivid and unforgettable images appear before their audience’s eyes. In the past decade, scholarship on early Christian use of ancient rhetorical techniques has flourished. One focus of rhetorical criticism of the New Testament has been the function of ekphrasis, or vivid visual description. In this landmark collection, leading New Testament scholars come together to probe the purpose and import of ekphrasis in early Christian literature. The research in this collection explores the relationship between vivid rhetoric and genre, taking into account technical features, authorial intent, and audience response. Specific topics include: • The New Testament’s rhetoric compared against Greco-Roman rhetorical handbooks • Juxtaposition between vivid and non-vivid rhetoric • The use of energeia in John’s Gospel to draw upon the reader’s multiple senses • Aesthetics and the grotesque in Revelation • The use of travelogue to create a virtual journey for the audience • Vivid rhetoric in early martyr literature Vivid Rhetoric and Visual Persuasion is a must-read for scholars of early Christianity and rhetorical criticism. Readers will find this collection indispensable in understanding a complex feature of the New Testament in its historical context. Contributors Contributors Bart B. Bruehler, Diane Fruchtman, Meghan Henning, Martina Kepper, Susanne Luther, Harry O. Maier, Gudrun Nassauer, Nils Neumann, Vernon K. Robbins, Gary S. Selby, Aldo Tagliabue, Sunny Kuan-Hui Wang, Annette Weissenrieder, Robyn J. Whitaker
Download or read book Immersion Identification and the Iliad written by Jonathan L. Ready and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character's perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of the character, and root for the character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.
Download or read book War as Spectacle written by Anastasia Bakogianni and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War as Spectacle examines the display of armed conflict in classical antiquity and its impact in the modern world. The contributors address the following questions: how and why was war conceptualized as a spectacle in our surviving ancient Greek and Latin sources? How has this view of war been adapted in post-classical contexts and to what purpose? This collection of essays engages with the motif of war as spectacle through a variety of theoretical and methodological pathways and frameworks. They include the investigation of the portrayal of armed conflict in ancient Greek and Latin Literature, History and Material Culture, as well as the reception of these ancient narratives and models in later periods in a variety of media. The collection also investigates how classical models contribute to contemporary debates about modern wars, including the interrogation of propaganda and news coverage. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of ancient warfare and its impact, the volume looks at a variety of angles and perspectives, including visual display and its exploitation for political capital, the function of internal and external audiences, ideology and propaganda and the commentary on war made possible by modern media. The reception of the theme in other cultures and eras demonstrates its continued relevance and the way antiquity is used to justify as well as to critique later conflicts.
Download or read book Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science written by Mihailo Antovic and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can oral poetic traditions teach us about language and the human mind? Oral Poetics has produced insights relevant not only for the study of traditional poetry, but also for our general understanding of language and cognition: formulaic style as a product of rehearsed improvisation, the thematic structuring of traditional narratives, or the poetic use of features from everyday speech, among many others. The cognitive sciences have developed frameworks that are crucial for research on oral poetics, such as construction grammar or conversation analysis. The key for connecting the two disciplines is their common focus on usage and performance. This collection of papers explores how some of the latest research on language and cognition can contribute to advances in oral studies. At the same time, it shows how research on verbal art in its natural, oral medium can lead to new insights in semantics, pragmatics, or multimodal communication. The ultimate goal is to pave the way towards a Cognitive Oral Poetics, a new interdisciplinary field for the study or oral poetry as a window to the mind.
Download or read book Virgil s Cinematic Art written by Kirk Freudenburg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-27 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book concerns the rhetoric of visual manipulation that provokes readers to envision what is written on the page, treating visual details in ancient epic not as mere scene-setting information or enhancements to any given story, but as cues for performing specific imaginative processes. Through a series of close readings centred primarily on Virgil's Aeneid, the book aims to show that the experiential effects that Virgil puts into play do serious narrative work of their own by structuring lines of sight, both visual and emotive, and shifting them about in ways that move readers into and out of the visual and emotional worlds of the story's characters. Whereas most studies of narrative visualization concern seeing, this one concerns watching. And listening. And trying to keep up. Informing the book's theoretical approach are recent cognitivist and constructivist studies of how audiences watch narrative films and make sense of what they are being given to see. By looking to the world of narrative films, where directors use shots craftily edited to cue audiences to 'fill in' for what the camera itself cannot show, the book locates new narrative content lurking in old places, brought to life within the imaginations of readers. The end result is a new approach to the question of how ancient epic tales convey narrative content through visual means"--
Download or read book Homer and the Poetics of Hades written by George Alexander Gazis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homer and the Poetics of Hades offers a new and unique approach to the Iliad and, more particularly, the Odyssey through an exploration of the role and function of the Underworld as a poetic resource permitting an alternative perspective on the epic past. By portraying Hades as a realm where vision is not possible, Homer creates a unique poetic environment in which social constraints and divine prohibitions do not apply, resulting in a narrative which emulates that of the Muses but which at the same time is markedly distinct from it. In Hades experimentation with, and alteration of, important epic forms and values can be pursued with greater freedom, giving rise to a different kind of poetics: the 'poetics of Hades'. In the Iliad, Homer offers us a glimpse of how this alternative poetics works through the visit of Patroclus' shade in Achilles' dream. The recollection offered by the shade reveals an approach to its past in which regret, self-pity, and a lingering memory of intimate and emotional moments displace an objective tone and traditional exposition of heroic values. However, the potential of Hades for providing alternative means of commemorating the past is more fully explored in the 'Nekyia' of Odyssey 11: there, Odysseus' extraordinary ability to see the dead in Hades allows him to meet and interview the shades of heroines and heroes of the epic past, while the absolute confinement of Hades allows the shades to recount their stories from their own personal points of view. The poetic implications are significant, since by visiting Hades and listening to the stories of the shades Odysseus, and Homer with him, gain access to a tradition in which epic values associated with gender roles and even divine law are suspended in favour of a more immediate and personally inflected approach to the epic past. As readers, this alternative poetics offers us more than just a revised framework within which to navigate the Iliad and the Odyssey, inviting as it does a more nuanced understanding of the Greeks' anxieties around mortality and posthumous fame.
