Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 6/23/2016
EAN 9781316613566, ISBN10: 1316613569
Paperback, 440 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
This volume explores how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms of meaning. The contributors analyse choruses as fictional, religious and civic performers; as combinations of text, song and dance; and as objects of reflection in themselves, in relation and contrast to the choruses of comedy and melic poetry. Drawing on earlier analyses of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual dimensions of tragedy, and the relations between dramatic and melic choruses, the chapters explore the uses of various analytic tools in allowing us better to capture the specificity of the tragic chorus. Special attention is given to the physicality of choral dancing, musical interactions between choruses and actors, the trajectories of reception, and the treatment of time and space in the odes.
1. Introduction
the chorus in the middle Renaud Gagné and Marianne Hopman
2. Choral polyphony and the ritual functions of tragic songs Claude Calame
3. Chorus, conflict, closure in Aeschylus' Persians Marianne Hopman
4. Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia Jonas Grethlein
5. Choreography
the lyric voice of Sophoclean tragedy Simon Goldhill
6. Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus Laura Swift
7. The choral plot of Euripides' Helen Sheila Murnaghan
8. Transcultural chorality
Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian imperial economics Barbara Kowalzig
9. Maenadism as self-referential chorality in Euripides' Bacchae Anton Bierl
10. The Delian maidens and their relevance to choral mimesis in Classical drama Gregory Nagy
11. Choral persuasions in Plato's Laws Lucia Prauscello
12. The comic chorus and the demagogue Jeffrey Henderson
13. Dancing letters
the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias Renaud Gagné
14. Choral dialectics
Hölderlin and Hegel Joshua Billings
15. Enter and exit the chorus
dance in Britain, 1880–1914 Fiona Macintosh
16. 'The thorniest problem and the greatest opportunity'
directors on directing the Greek chorus Peter Meineck.