Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama

The book "Tragic Bodies" argues that Greek tragedy treats the body as a thing, emphasizing bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing in key scenes. It explores the ways in which Greek tragedy pulls up close to human bodies, examining their physical edges, surfaces, and parts, and their coverings or nakedness.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 304 pages
\n Publication date: 10 December 2020
\n Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Winner of the PROSE Award (2022) for Classics, this book presents a groundbreaking approach to reading tragedy that emphasizes the intricate interplay between bodies and their surrounding environments. By exploring the fluidity between subject and object, person and thing, living and dead, Greek tragedy serves as a vehicle for confronting the boundaries of human existence. At the same time, it delves into the ways in which Greek tragedy intimately engages with human bodies, examining their physical edges, surfaces, and parts, as well as their coverings or nakedness, and postures and orientations. Drawing on the latest interplays of posthumanism and materialism in relation to classical literature, Nancy Worman demonstrates how Greek drama often treats the body as a thing, imbuing it with the same status and implications as other objects such as cloaks, urns, or toys for dogs. Tragic Bodies urges readers to pay close attention to key scenes in Greek tragedy that foreground bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing. This occurs when signs with profound symbolic resonance emerge on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and conflation, orchestrated through proximity, contact, and sensory dynamics. By reading the dramatic script in this way, readers are invited to pursue the felt knowledge at the body's edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration that is attuned to how bodies register at the unique intersections of tragedy, where directive and figurative language combine to highlight visual, tactile, and aural details.

\n Weight: 618g\n
Dimension: 241 x 164 x 23 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781350124363\n \n