Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy

Renaud Gagné, Marianne Govers Hopman

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781107033283
• eBook ISBN: 9781107070134
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Choral polyphony and the ritual functions of tragic songs
• Chapter 3 Chorus, conflict, and closure in Aeschylus’ Persians
• Chapter 4 Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia
• Chapter 5 Choreography
• Chapter 6 Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus
• Chapter 7 The choral plot of Euripides’ Helen
• Chapter 8 Transcultural chorality
• Chapter 9 Maenadism as self-referential chorality in Euripides’ Bacchae
• Chapter 10 The Delian Maidens and their relevance to choral mimesis in classical drama
• Chapter 11 Choral persuasions in Platos Laws
• Chapter 12 The comic chorus and the demagogue
• Chapter 13 Dancing letters
• Chapter 14 Choral dialectics
• Chapter 15 Enter and exit the chorus
• Chapter 16 “The thorniest problem and the greatest opportunity”
• Bibliography
• Index