Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama

Description

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. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Epigraph Dedication CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PROLOGUE SKIN TO SKIN IN GREEK TRAGEDY 1. Figuration, Embodiment, and Semiotic Materialities 2. Tragic Aesthetics 3. A Net the Gods Made 4. Setting the Scene CHAPTER 1 TOUCHING OEDIPUS: PROXIMITIES, CONTACT, AND AFFECTIVE INTIMACIES 1. Sensing Bodies 2. Witnessing and Handling Bodies in Pain 3. Oedipal Proxemics and Touching CHAPTER 2 THE SIBLING HAND: MANUAL EROTICS AND VIOLENCE 1. Hands-on Family 2. Killing Versus Loving Hands (Aeschylus to Sophocles) 3. Siblings Hand-to-Hand (Euripides) 4. Other Manual Menaces CHAPTER 3 FAMILIAL COVERINGS: SKIN, CLOAKS, AND OTHER OUTERWEAR 1. Parental Carapaces 2. Spousal Mantles 3. Racialized Carapaces 4. Shields, Pelts, and Similar Shells CHAPTER 4 STRANGE CONTAINERS: BODIES AND OTHER TRAGIC VESSELS 1. “Material” Edges 2. “Human” Vessels: Jar, Coffin, Tomb 3. Inside Out CHAPTER 5 BODILY ALTERATIONS: UNDRESS, PROSTHESIS, AND ASSEMBLAGE 1. Fleshly Extensions 2. Female Assemblages and “Nudity” 2. Captive and Mourning Assemblages 3. Other Familial Groupings CHAPTER 6 MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS: CORPSES, GHOSTS, STATUES 1. Creatures and Demons in Aeschylus 2. Ghosts and Eerie Doubles 3. Suppliant Bodies and/as Statues 4. The Undead FINAL SCENES: BEYOND THE HUMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX LOCORUM GENERAL INDEX