The Vengeful Lioness in Greek Tragedy: A Posthumanist Perspective1

2018 ◽  
pp. 203-220
Author(s):  
Alessandra Abbattista
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Human Male ◽  
Female Hybrid

This chapter reinterprets the animal metaphors used in ancient Greek tragedy to describe revenging women from a posthumanist perspective. Whereas critics have commonly regarded such metaphors as indicating the female revenger’s inhuman savagery and otherness (whereby a woman’s attempt to assume a male heroic role transforms her instead into a monstrous beast), posthumanism challenges conventional distinctions between animal and human, male and female. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, it argues that female revengers similarly challenge these distinctions. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea into lionesses reveals their complex figuration as male-female hybrid beings, recalling the tragic suffering and protective violence of the Homeric lion within a new context of interfamilial conflicts. These transformations engender terror but also compassion, evoking new ways of conceptualising humans-as-animals that invite recognition of our own unstable and hybrid nature.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

Comparative proteomics of human male and female tears by two-dimensional electrophoresis

2011 ◽  
Vol 92 (6) ◽  
pp. 454-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sivagnanam Ananthi ◽  
Ramachandran Sarojini Santhosh ◽  
Murugesan Valar Nila ◽  
Namperumalsamy Venkatesh Prajna ◽  
Prajna Lalitha ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Proteomics ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Two Dimensional Electrophoresis ◽  
Human Male ◽  
Dimensional Electrophoresis

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Eades
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Artistic Heritage

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.

Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gourd
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Commit Suicide

As Septimus Smith prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window and ‘vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings,’ he comments on the narrative tradition of his own tragic demise. ‘It was their idea of tragedy,’ he reflects with bitter irony – ‘Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing.’ This paper addresses the wider implications of this sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by positioning Septimus’ death as the tragic climax and dramatic focus of the novel. Previous scholarship has failed to recognise the significance of this allusion to Greek tragedy, though Woolf was an accomplished classical scholar and a voracious reader of ancient literature. This detail would repay attention, as the author’s self-conscious engagement with the literary and intellectual tradition of tragedy, demonstrated through the narrative and suicide of Septimus Smith, impacts upon our understanding of the novel as a whole. It raises several important questions which this paper seeks to address: to what extent does Woolf intend for us to sympathise with Septimus as the tragic protagonist? How does Woolf’s appropriation and manipulation of the tragic genre reflect her views on war, mental illness, and her relationship with her doctors? And finally, what does it tell us about Woolf’s idea of tragedy, and what she considers to be tragic?

Women, behavior, and evolution: Understanding the debate between feminist evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists

2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurette T. Liesen
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Environmental Variables ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Female Behavior ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Sexual Equality ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Human Male ◽  
Evolution Understanding

Often since the early 1990s, feminist evolutionists have criticized evolutionary psychologists, finding fault in their analyses of human male and female reproductive behavior. Feminist evolutionists have criticized various evolutionary psychologists for perpetuating gender stereotypes, using questionable methodology, and exhibiting a chill toward feminism. Though these criticisms have been raised many times, the conflict itself has not been fully analyzed. Therefore, I reconsider this conflict, both in its origins and its implications. I find that the approaches and perspectives of feminist evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists are distinctly different, leading many of the former to work in behavioral ecology, primatology, and evolutionary biology. Invitingly to feminist evolutionists, these three fields emphasize social behavior and the influences of environmental variables; in contrast, evolutionary psychology has come to rely on assumptions deemphasizing the pliability of psychological mechanisms and the flexibility of human behavior. In behavioral ecology, primatology, and evolutionary biology, feminist evolutionists have found old biases easy to correct and new hypotheses practical to test, offering new insights into male and female behavior, explaining the emergence and persistence of patriarchy, and potentially bringing closer a prime feminist goal, sexual equality.

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