"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"--

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.

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.

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.

This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka's engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka's writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka's prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka's critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history. Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka's authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa's ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka's notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.

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

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.