Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece

Bostock, Robert Nigel

doi:10.1017/9781316761588

Cited by 48 publications

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“…The works of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, but also Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Diego Lanza, and others for the Ancients, and Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams for the early modern period onwards, remain largely unsurpassed in their totalising grasp, though serious advances have been made, for instance, in the study of the relation between monetised exchange, sacrifice and Ancient tragedy. 121 The vital if ambivalent nexus between tragedy and revolution as categories of modernity has also been the object of concerted treatment, 122 while the hitherto largely neglected connections between tragedy, slavery (both ancient and modern) 123 and revolutions against racial capitalism 124 -intercut by the thematization of gender and sex difference -have also come to the fore as critical foci of research. While the death or decline of tragedy may still be a widespread conviction, albeit one that has been compelling countered, 125 there are few signs that the theory of tragedy is nearing expiry.…”

Section: Discussion Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…16 This predominance of plot is directly linked to key dimensions of Aristotle's poetics of tragedy, namely what we could call, on the one hand, its textualism, on the other, its anti-musical, anti-spectacular and anti-ritualistic bias. In a manner which, as we'll explore further below, jars with the deeply ritualised place of tragic performances in the agonistic and religious-political context of the Dionysia, for Aristotle the quality of a tragedy is 'clear from reading', 17 and its central affective dimension is fundamentally carried by plot alone. If the latter is properly constructed -as Aristotle's model, the Oedipus Tyrannos, testifies, 'even without seeing it, anyone who hears the events which occur shudders and feels pity at what happens'.…”

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Tragedy

Toscano¹

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

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From Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics onward, tragedy has loomed large in the genealogy of literary theory. But this prominence is in many regards paradoxical. The original object of that theory, the Attic tragedies performed at the Dionysian festivals in 5th- century bce Athens, are, notwithstanding their ubiquitous representation on the modern stage, only a small fraction of the tragedies produced in Athens, and are themselves torn from their context of performance. The Poetics and the plays that served as its objects of analysis would long vanish from the purview of European culture. Yet, when they returned in the Renaissance as cultural monuments to be appropriated and repeated, it was in a context largely incommensurable with their existence in Ancient Greece. While the early moderns created their own poetics (and politics) of tragedy and enlisted their image of the Ancients in the invention of exquisitely modern literary and artistic forms (not least, opera), it was in the crucible of German Idealism and Romanticism, arguably the matrix of modern literary theory, that certain Ancient Greek tragedies were transmuted into models of “the tragic,” an idea that played a formative part in the emergence of philosophical modernity, accompanying a battle of the giants between dialectical (Hegelian) and antidialectical (Nietzschean) currents that continues to shape our theoretical present. The gap between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics and history of tragedy as a dramatic genre is the site of much rich and provocative debate, in which the definition of literary theory itself is frequently at stake. Tragedy is in this sense usefully defined as a genre in conflict. It is also a genre of conflict, in the sense that ethical conflicts, historical transitions, and political revolutions have all come to define its literary forms, something that is particularly evident in the place of both tragedy and the tragic in the dramas of decolonization.

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Section: Discussion Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Tragedy

Toscano¹

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

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“…122 Cf. Scodel 1999 123 Sul motivo, frequente in tragedia, del sacrificio 'distorto', mi limito a rimandare a Seaford 2018, 3-14, con bibliografia. Kovacs 1988, 118-120 e Diggle 2008 evidenziano, a mio parere giustamente, delle difficoltà nei versi 1053-5 (ὅτῳ δὲ μὴ | θέμις παρεῖναι τοῖς ἐμοῖσι θύμασιν, | αὐτῷ μελήσει), di solito, ma con qualche forzatura, interpretati come uno stravolgimento della formula per allontanare gli impuri dal sacrificio (cf.…”

Section: Giuseppe Lentiniunclassified