Description
Book SynopsisPROSE AWARDS CLASSICS FINALIST 2024What does it mean to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, a global crisis? How can Greek tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? One of the outstanding and most widely read theorists in the discipline, Mario Telò, brings together a deep understanding of Greek tragedy and its most famous icons with contemporary times. In close readings of plays such as Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Hecuba, Oedipus the King, Prometheus Bound, and Trojan Women, our experience is precariously refracted back in the formal worlds of plays named after and, to an extent, epitomized by tragic characters.Structured around four thematic clusters Air Time Faces, Communities, Ruins, and Insurrections this book presents timely interventions in critical theory and in the debates that matter to us as disaster becomes routine in the time-out-of-joint of a (post-)pandemic world. Violently encompassing all pre-existing and future crises (relational, political and ecological),
Trade ReviewGreek Tragedy in a Global Crisis is an exciting experiment in thinking with and through ancient theater and contemporary theory. It stimulates, provokes, and consoles, and will be a powerful resource for readers of all kinds. -- Joshua Billings, Professor of Classics, Princeton University, USA
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Reading Greek Tragedy through Pandemic Times
I. Air Time Faces 1. Oedipus 2. Teiresias Cadmus Dionysus 3. Iphigenia
II. Communities 4. Alcestis 5. The suppliant women
III. Ruins 6. Antigone 7. Niobe
IV. Insurrections 8. Prometheus 9. Hecuba 10. The Trojan women Epilogue
