Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler

Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler PDF

Author: Mario Telò

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 135032339X

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Considering Butler's “tragic trilogy”-a set of interventions on Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Bacchae, and Aeschylus's Eumenides-this book seeks to understand not just how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy, but also how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking, even when their gaze is directed elsewhere. Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler's writing. It shows how Butler's mode of reading tragedy-and, crucially, reading tragically-offers a distinctive ethico-political response to the harrowing dilemmas of our current moment. Deeply committed both to critical theory and political activism, Judith Butler is one of the most influential intellectuals today. Their ideas have touched the lives of many people, both readers and those who have never heard Butler's name. In encompassing gender performativity and sexual difference, vulnerability and precarity, disidentification and bodily interdependency, as well as the politics of protest, Butler's work is often predicated on a strong engagement with or proximity to Greek tragedy.

Antigone's Claim

Antigone's Claim PDF

Author: Judith Butler

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2002-05-23

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 0231518048

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The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship—and open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life. Butler explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. How, she asks, would psychoanalysis have been different if it had taken Antigone—the "postoedipal" subject—rather than Oedipus as its point of departure? If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.

Reading Greek Tragedy

Reading Greek Tragedy PDF

Author: Simon Goldhill

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-02

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1009185063

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This book is an advanced critical introduction to Greek tragedy. It is written specifically for the reader who does not know Greek and who may be unfamiliar with the context of the Athenian drama festival but who nevertheless wants to appreciate the plays in all their complexity. Simon Goldhill aims to combine the best contemporary scholarly criticism in classics with a wide knowledge of modern literary studies in other fields. He discusses the masterpieces of Athenian drama in the light of contemporary critical controversies in such a way as to enable the student or scholar not only to understand and appreciate the texts of the most commonly read plays, but also to evaluate and utilize the range of approaches to the problems of ancient drama. This revised edition contains a substantial new Introduction which engages with critical and scholarly developments in Greek tragedy since the original publication.

Rethinking Tragedy

Rethinking Tragedy PDF

Author: Rita Felski

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2008-02-11

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780801887390

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This groundbreaking collection provokes a major reassessment of the significance of tragedy and the tragic in late modernity. A distinguished group of scholars and theorists extends the discussion of tragedy beyond its usual parameters to include film, popular culture, and contemporary politics. Seven new essays—as well as eight essays originally published in a New Literary History special issue on tragedy—address important, previously neglected areas of tragedy and postcolonial criticism. The new material explores the tragic dimensions of popular culture, the relationship between tragedy and pity, and feminism's avoidance of the tragic, and includes an incisive history of tragic theory. Classic and cutting-edge, this collection offers a provocative, accessible, and comprehensive treatment of tragedy and tragic theory. Contributors: Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zurich; Stanley Corngold, Princeton University; Simon Critchley, University of Essex; Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of California, Los Angeles; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University; Page duBois, University of California, San Diego; Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester; Rita Felski, University of Virginia; Simon Goldhill, Cambridge University; Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania; Michel Maffesoli, University of Paris (V); Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago; Timothy J. Reiss, New York University; Kathleen M. Sands, University of Massachusetts, Boston; David Scott, Columbia University; George Steiner, University of Geneva; Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh

The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature

The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature PDF

Author: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2005-12-13

Total Pages: 912

ISBN-13: 9781402035753

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Striking toward peace and harmony the human being is ceasely torn apart in personal, social, national life by wars feuds, inequities and intimate personal conflicts for which there seems to be no respite. Does the human condition in interaction with others imply a constant adversity? Or, is this conflict owing to an interior or external factor of evil governing our attitudes and conduct toward the other person? To what criteria should I refer for appreciation, judgment, direction concerning my attitudes and my actions as they bear on the well-being of others? At the roots of these questions lies human experience which ought to be appropriately clarified before entering into speculative abstractions of the ethical theories and precepts. Literature, which in its very gist, dwells upon disentangling in multiple perspective the peripeteia of our life-experience offers us a unique field of source-material for moral and ethical investigations. Literature brings preeminently to light the Moral Sentiment which pervades our life with others -- our existence tout court. Being modulated through the course of our experiences the Moral Sentiment sustains the very sense of literature and of personal human life (Tymieniecka). Papers by: Tony E. Afejuku, Alira Ashvo-Munoz, Gary Backhaus, Alain Beaulieu, M. Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Predrag Cicovacki, Dorothy G. Clark, Jerre Collins, Michael D. Daniels, Michel Dion, Tsung-I Dow, William Edelglass, Richard Findler, Jorge Garcia-Gomez, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Andrew Jones-Cathcart, Lawrence Kimmel, Ken Kirby, Marlies Kronegger, Megan Laverty, Lew Livesay, Annika Ljung- Baruth, Bernard Micallef, Rebecca M. Painter, Bernadette Prochaska, Sitansu Ray, Valerie Reed, Victor Gerald Rivas, Kristine S. Santilli, Christopher Schreiner, Jadwiga Smith, Max Statkiewicz, George R. Tibbetts, Rosaria Trovato, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Peter Weigel, Raymond J. Wilson III, John Zbikowski.

Private Lives, Public Deaths

Private Lives, Public Deaths PDF

Author: Jonathan Strauss

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2013-07

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0823251322

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Private Lives, Public Deaths draws on classical studies, Hegel, and modern philosophical analyses to describe how Sophocle's tragedy Antigone expresses a key concern of ancient Greek culture: the value of a living individual.

Bound by Recognition

Bound by Recognition PDF

Author: Patchen Markell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1400825873

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In an era of heightened concern about injustice in relations of identity and difference, political theorists often prescribe equal recognition as a remedy for the ills of subordination. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, they envision a system of reciprocal knowledge and esteem, in which the affirming glance of others lets everyone be who they really are. This book challenges the equation of recognition with justice. Patchen Markell mines neglected strands of the concept's genealogy and reconstructs an unorthodox interpretation of Hegel, who, in the unexpected company of Sophocles, Aristotle, Arendt, and others, reveals why recognition's promised satisfactions are bound to disappoint, and even to stifle. Written with exceptional clarity, the book develops an alternative account of the nature and sources of identity-based injustice in which the pursuit of recognition is part of the problem rather than the solution. And it articulates an alternative conception of justice rooted not in the recognition of identity of the other but in the acknowledgment of our own finitude in the face of a future thick with surprise. Moving deftly among contemporary political philosophers (including Taylor and Kymlicka), the close interpretation of ancient and modern texts (Hegel's Phenomenology, Aristotle's Poetics, and more), and the exploration of rich case studies drawn from literature (Antigone), history (Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia), and modern politics (official multiculturalism), Bound by Recognition is at once a sustained treatment of the problem of recognition and a sequence of virtuoso studies.

On Germans and Other Greeks

On Germans and Other Greeks PDF

Author: Dennis J. Schmidt

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2001-09-19

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780253214430

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Tracing the efforts of philosophers to appropriate the issues opened up by tragedy as a literary form, Dennis Schmidt makes the argument that in the struggle to come to terms with the issues raised by tragedy, new and progressive avenues for addressing the questions of ethic life have come to the fore.

Reader in Tragedy

Reader in Tragedy PDF

Author: Marcus Nevitt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-03-21

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1474270433

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"This unique anthology presents a selection of the most important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different historical periods and varieties of thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for generations of artists, critics, and thinkers. [...] Ideas of tragedy have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato to Judith Butler have analysed the genre of tragedy to probe fundamental questions about ethics, pleasure, and responsibility. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information?" --

Tragedy Since 9/11

Tragedy Since 9/11 PDF

Author: Jennifer Wallace

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1350035637

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From the trauma of September 11th, through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the environmental warning signs of climate change, this book reflects on the crises and terrifying events of the early 21st century and argues that a knowledge of tragedy from the works of Sophocles to Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett can help us understand them. Jennifer Wallace offers a cultural analysis of the tragic events of the past two decades with reference to a litany of key dramatic texts, including Aeschylus' Oresteia, Euripides' Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis, Trojan Women and Bacchae, Homer's Iliad, Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean and Enemy of the People, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Macbeth and King Lear, among others.