Tragic Rhetoric The Rhetorical Dimensions Of Greek Tragedy

Part 1. Rhetorical dimensions of drama: the classical context: The enthymeme and the invention of troping in Greek drama / August W. Staub. Theorizing the spectacle: a rhetorical analysis of tragic recognition / Tom Heeney. Exile and the kingdom: reason as nightmare in the Aeschylean vision / John Arthos -- Part 2. The rhetorical in renaissance and neoclassical drama: Epideictic pastoral: rhetorical tensions in the staging of Torquato Tasso's Aminta / Maria Galli Stampino. Shakespeare's rhetoric versus the ideology of Ian McKellen's Richard III / George L. Geckle. And now for application: Venice preserv'd and the rhetoric of textual application / Odai Johnson -- Part 3. War, politics, and the drama: Federalist and republican theatre in the 1790s / Steve Wilmer. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the rhetoric of gradualism / Charles Wilbanks. Dario Fo's angry farce / Stanley Vincent Longman -- Part 4. Contemporary culture: Stain upon the silence: Samuel Beckett's deconstructive inventions / Leigh Anne Howard. Still angry after all these years: performing the language of HIV and the marked body in The normal heart and The destiny of me / Peter Michael Pober.

This innovative study of Sophocles' Trachiniae deepens our appreciation of the enigmatic nature of Sophoclean tragedy and its place in the Athens of the Sophists. By carefully examining the play's narrative and rhetorical strategies, Bruce Heiden shows that the plot of Trachiniae must be constructed by the creative interpretation of the spectator or reader, and he demonstrates that Sophocles' extensive use of speeches reporting offstage events dramatizes the very problems that arise when rhetorical claims of knowledge conceal acts of interpretation. Tragic Rhetoric will interest both classicists and students of literary theory.

The contributors, who include many of the world's foremost names in the field of Greek drama, debate the question. They reassess particular Greek plays, from Oresteia to Antigone and Oedipus to Ion; they re-examine Greek tragedy in its cultural and political context; and the relate the tragedy of the Greeks to the serious drama and theoretical perspectives of the modern world, with Shakespeare at the forefront of several essays.

Despite the crucial roles they often play, no study yet compares the off-stage assemblies, armies, and populations found in surviving Athenian dramatic works. Covering fifth- and early fourth-century tragedy and comedy, Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama analyses how off-stage groups influence and respond to events on stage, and how characters interact with these groups. Drama exploits these groups' off-stage nature by depicting them through different characters' viewpoints: characters often struggle to define, predict, or control off-stage groups, which obscures and challenges the audience's ability to interpret them. The interaction between multivalent and sometimes contradictory narratives of off-stage groups demands a new interpretive framework. Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama provides this framework, offering new readings of several prominent comedies and tragedies. However, the importance of this framework extends beyond drama. The first chapter surveys depictions of group decision-making in fifth-century prose, in order to demonstrate how Athenian drama responds to prose depictions of group psychology. Athenian drama engages with the early ideas of group psychology circulating in fifth- and early fourth-century Athens; it creates fictive worlds where stereotypical depictions of collective emotion can be probed, explored and taken to their logical extremes. Studying off-stage groups therefore allows us to rethink our understanding of narrative, politics, and social psychology in drama, and the ways in which these fields intersect.

Combining several critical approaches - narrative theory, genre study, and rhetorical analysis - this lucid and sophisticated study develops a synthetic view of the messenger of Greek tragedy, showing how this role illuminates some of the genre's most persistent concerns, especially those relating to language, knowledge, and the workings of tragic theater itself.".