Tony Harrison's Prometheus: a View from the Left
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Iwas Lucky to Be in London in May and Catch
The Scream REBECCA NEMSER I was lucky to be in London in May and catch Fram , Tony Harrison’s latest play,* in its short but spectacu - lar run at the Olivier Theatre at London’s National Theatre. The play, all in rhyming verse, begins in Westminster Abbey, with moonlight shining through the stained glass of the great Rose Window, casting a reflection of Aeschylus on the cold stone floor. In walks the ghost of Gilbert Murray (Jeff Rawle), rising up from his grave and carrying a tragic mask. Murray, the early-twentieth-century Oxford professor and classicist, was also a humanitarian, deeply involved in the League of Nations and the United Nations and co-founder of Oxfam. But since his death fifty years ago, his once-admired verse translations of Aeschylus and Euripides have been scorned, and the world he tried to save has been ravaged by even more unimaginable horrors. So instead of decomposing in his urn, he has spent his afterlife composing this play. He calls up the spirit of Sybil Thorndike (Sian Thomas, as splendid as the character she plays), the actress who tri - umphed on the London stage as Clytemnestra, Hecuba, and Medea in Murray’s once wildly popular versions, and whisks her off to the Olivier stalls of the National Theatre—for Fram is not just a play within a play, but a theater within a theater. Most of all, it is a poem about poetry. The hero of the play is Fridtjof Nansen (Jasper Britton), Murray’s long-ago friend (and admirer of his translations)— the dashing Norwegian scientist, artist, and Arctic explorer *Tony Harrison, Fram . -
Homer's Iliad Via the Movie Troy (2004)
23 November 2017 Homer’s Iliad via the Movie Troy (2004) PROFESSOR EDITH HALL One of the most successful movies of 2004 was Troy, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Brad Pitt as Achilles. Troy made more than $497 million worldwide and was the 8th- highest-grossing film of 2004. The rolling credits proudly claim that the movie is inspired by the ancient Greek Homeric epic, the Iliad. This was, for classical scholars, an exciting claim. There have been blockbuster movies telling the story of Troy before, notably the 1956 glamorous blockbuster Helen of Troy starring Rossana Podestà, and a television two-episode miniseries which came out in 2003, directed by John Kent Harrison. But there has never been a feature film announcing such a close relationship to the Iliad, the greatest classical heroic action epic. The movie eagerly anticipated by those of us who teach Homer for a living because Petersen is a respected director. He has made some serious and important films. These range from Die Konsequenz (The Consequence), a radical story of homosexual love (1977), to In the Line of Fire (1993) and Air Force One (1997), political thrillers starring Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford respectively. The Perfect Storm (2000) showed that cataclysmic natural disaster and special effects spectacle were also part of Petersen’s repertoire. His most celebrated film has probably been Das Boot (The Boat) of 1981, the story of the crew of a German U- boat during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. The finely judged and politically impartial portrayal of ordinary men, caught up in the terror and tedium of war, suggested that Petersen, if anyone, might be able to do some justice to the Homeric depiction of the Trojan War in the Iliad. -
2016 Latham Caroline 123237
This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Reanimating Greek Tragedy How Contemporary Poets Translate for the Stage Latham, Caroline Susan Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Reanimating Greek Tragedy How Contemporary Poets Translate for the Stage Caroline Susan Latham Degree: Doctor of Philosophy in Classics Research (Field of study: the modern reception of Greek tragedy) 1 Abstract This thesis starts from the premise that modern poets have proved effective translators of Greek tragedy for the stage and is a hermeneutic consideration of why and how they succeeded. -
Imitating Βάρβαροι:: the Appropriation of Persian Culture in Greece After the Persian Wars
Imitating βάρβαροι:: The Appropriation of Persian Culture in Greece after the Persian Wars During the Orientalizing Period of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the Aegean world was heavily influenced by the cultures of the Ancient Near East. The Greeks were accepting of Persian symbols and decorations and were quick to adapt these objects into their own art and culture. This period proved that Greek artists and craftsmen themselves were capable of producing eastern motifs on their own works. However, I hope to show that after the Greek victory in the Persian Wars, eastern influences increased and became more prominent in mainland Greek art and architecture and that it became more acceptable for the Greeks to own possessions with eastern motifs. After the wars, the Greeks were accepting and even jealous of Persian fashions (Bridges et al. 2007, 37) and the influence of Persian “material goods aided the process of social stratification…and contributed to status expression in the subsequent Hellenistic world” (Miller 2003, 319). To take this further, I aim to look at Persian culture being appropriated by the Greeks for their own uses during the emergence of the new democracy, to show that while these images, symbols, and fashions were not Greek in origin, they were so commonly used and adapted by the Greeks that they then became symbols of their ‘Greekness.’ This paper will look primarily at material culture, but will also examine mentions of Persian objects and ideas in Greek literature, such as Aeschylus’ Persians and Herodotus’ Histories. I will start by examining the adaptation of Persian symbols in Greek society, considering the acceptance of Persian clothing, with examples of Persian dress seen on vases and grave stelai and mentions of Persian slippers in dramas such as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and the introduction and use of Persian parasols, seen in Aristophanes’ Birds and by Eros holding a parasol of Aphrodite on the Parthenon frieze. -
On Not Being Tony Harrison: Tradition and the Individual Talent of David Dabydeen
On Not Being Tony Harrison: Tradition and the Individual Talent of David Dabydeen LEE M.JENKINS ^^)NE OF THE MORE unusual critical responses to T. S. Eliot is surely David Dabydeen's claim that "Eliot is the parent of Carib• bean poetry." Indeed, Dabydeen himself feels the need to qualify his remark before he makes it, when he says that Eliot assumes this parental role "in a peculiar sense" (Grant 211). On a thematic level, much of the work of the British-based Indo-Caribbean poet Dabydeen is to do with absent parents (the poet's actual parents, his parent country of Guyana and the Caribbean parent language, Creole; now living in England, Dabydeen shares with Eliot the sta• tus of metoikos, or resident alien); on a formal level, his poetry is less a quest for origins than it is a turbulent — by turns loving and loathing, respectful and rebellious — relationship with Eliot and other literary progenitors from Homer to Tony Harrison.1 Dabydeen's agon with Eliot is evident from his first collection, Slave Song (1984). The poet's use of Creole in this collection is, on one level, a testament of authenticity and, paradoxically given Dabydeen's tide, a proclamation of emancipation from the influ• ence of Eliot and Western literary tradition: this black vernacular is a language which, despite its "capacity for a savage lyricism" per• mits no level of abstraction, so "you cannot have the Four Quartets in Creole" (Binder 171, 170). Notwithstanding this, the innova• tion of contemporary Black British and Caribbean poetry suggests a certain continuity with Eliot; prior to these poetries, Dabydeen has argued, "the last great innovator in British poetry this century has been T. -
House of Atreus Syllabus
Greek 114: Honors Seminar in Greek Drama The House of Atreus in Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, Eurpides’ Orestes Grace Ledbetter This seminar is a close reading of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Eurpides’ Orestes. We will also read the entire Oresteia, Eurpides’ Electra and Iphigeneia plays in English. Copies of these Greek and English texts are available in the bookstore, in addition to Aristotle’s Poetics and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which we will also consider in the course of our discussions. Required texts: 1) J. D. Denniston and D. L. Page, Aeschylus Agamemnon, Clarendon. 2) J. H. Kells, Sophocles Electra, Cambridge. 3) T. M. Falkner, Euripdes’ Orestes, Bryn Mawr Commentaries. 4) Fagles, trans, Oresteia 5) Eur. Electra, Iphegeneia in Aulis, Iphigeneia in Tauris in English 6) Aristotle, Poetics. 7) Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy. Work for the Course: 1) weekly translation and reading assignments 2) approximately bi-weekly oral presentations on specific passages or other readings. 3) three 8-10 page papers, integrating secondary literature, which will be due during weeks when there is no Greek reading assignment. 4) final exam: translation only. Syllabus: Week 1 background readings and video of Tony Harrison’s and Peter Hall’s Agamemnon (National Theater of Great Britain). P. Wilson, “Powers of horror and laughter: the great age of drama” in O. Taplin, ed. Literature in the Greek World, Oxford, 2000 Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature. tragedy chapters Gantz, Early Greek Myth. (The Line of Tantalos; Agamemnon; Orestes; Iphigeneia). Aeschylus’ Oresteia in English. Fagles translation Agamemnon 1-39 in Greek Week 2 Agamemnon 1-354 (with Denniston-Page; Fraenkel) R. -
Aristotle Professor Edith Hall 4 March 2021 Introduction Aristotle Is
Aristotle Professor Edith Hall 4 March 2021 Introduction Aristotle is arguably the most influential intellectual who ever lived. I say ‘intellectual’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because he contributed to so many disciplines other than philosophy, including what we call sciences such as Physics and Zoology and art-related endeavours such as literary criticism. But despite the sheer range of his investigations, there is a coherent method and system underlying all of them, with its own terminology, much of which he created almost from scratch. In a Gresham lecture two years ago, I described Aristotle’s life, his twenty years spent studying at Plato’s Academy, his travels in Turkey and Lesbos, his tutoring of the teenaged Alexander before he became The Great, and his university at Athens, the Lyceum.1 This was the first institution to combine teaching at a range of levels from public lectures to cutting-edge specialised research across the disciplinary spectrum. It also housed his personal library, which later became the model behind the Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria. Aristotle founded the Lyceum when he was nearly 50. He died not much more than a decade later, after being driven out of Athens by politicians suspicious of his association with Kings Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon. But in that last part of his life, he produced, scholars think, the majority of the 200 or more treatises attributed to him. Around 30 authentic works have survived to be read today. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle asks why humans invented philosophy. ‘Human beings now and when they began to do philosophy do so because of their sense of wonder. -
The Land That Rises Dialect As Unheimlich Vol 1 K0835401 Morris
THE LAND THAT RISES: DIALECT AS UNHEIMLICH IN BRITISH WRITING CATHERINE MORRIS A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Kingston University September, 2018 Volume 1 Abstract This thesis is in two parts. The first is a critical analysis of the use of dialect as unheimlich in British writing. Using Freud’s essay, The Uncanny (1919), as its basis, this thesis will argue that the use of dialect creates tension within a text between the representation of home, and of that which may be considered unhomely. Reading a range of British texts psychoanalytically alongside sociolinguistic studies, this thesis seeks to show how an author’s choice of dialect-use within their literary form is bound up with an unheimlich mind-set of dialect within both writer and reader, whilst considering the cultural and historical contexts in which these attitudes are based. A range of unheimlich notions may be read from dialect, and its use is to be repressed or rejected as abject and replaced with the more accessible standard English associated with education, adulthood, civilisation and power. Yet it might also be read that, through standard English, the ‘strange’ has been brought into our homes and our mouths, made familiar through the hegemonic appropriation of the ‘mother tongue’. Whilst the hearing of spoken accents and dialects within various medias has become increasingly common, negative connotations remain, especially when presented in the written form; what might be familiar to the ear remains strange to the eye. Its use divides readers as to its necessity and desirability, suggesting there is a long way to go before dialects are accepted fully in literary terms. -
Greek Drama As Feminist Window on American Identity 1900-1925
Pre-print version of article forthcoming in K. Bosher, F. Macintosh, J. McConnell and Patrice Rankine (eds. 2014) The Oxford Handbook to Greek Drama in the Americas The Migrant Muse: Greek Drama as Feminist Window on American Identity 1900-1925 Edith Hall (KCL) The Quest for a New Muse Just before the academic rediscovery of ancient Greek drama in performance in the 1880s, Walt Whitman appealed for a new form of poetry to replace worn-out classicism, in ‘Song of the exposition’ (1871): Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia; Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts. That matter of Troy, and Achilles’ wrath, and Eneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings; Place ‘Removed’ and ‘To Let’ on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus... For know a better, fresher, busier sphere – a wide, untried domain, awaits, demands you. But what, precisely, would be the nature of the Muse’s fresher, busier, untried North American domain? If she was to migrate from Greece and Ionia, how was she to adapt herself to a new destination far from her original home? This chapter looks at some ways in which American Modernist feminists used the Muse of Greek drama in the reconfiguration of American identity. Fifty years later, on July 7th 1921, Calvin Coolidge, Vice-President of the USA, addressed the American Classical League at UP in Philadelphia. Despite the tumultuous history 1 Pre-print version of article forthcoming in K. Bosher, F. Macintosh, J. McConnell and Patrice Rankine (eds. 2014) The Oxford Handbook to Greek Drama in the Americas of the intervening decades, he still defended the American tradition of classical education, even while confessing his desire for a distinctively American identity: We do not wish to be Greek. -
Kristen Thompson
Pour One Out For the Perisan King: Greek Magic and Depictions of Barbarian Witch Queens in Athenian Tragedy Kristen Thompson HIS 492: Seminar in History Professor Gatzke 11 May 2021 Thompson 1 In 431 BCE, the City Dionysia festival of Athens held the first performance of Euripides’ tragedy Medea. The Athenian audience filling in the theater of Dionysus likely possessed some rough expectations of what the play would entail. Medea, a mythic woman about whom several past poets and scholars had written, was best known for her use of potions and relationship to the Greek hero Jason. The dominant narrative of her story before Euripides, while sometimes containing tragedy and death, had never depicted Medea in too much of an unfavorable light.1 As the play started, Euripides’ Medea would quickly shatter these preconceived expectations as she committed the greatest atrocities imaginable in the minds of the Greeks. The production would follow her quest for revenge against her cheating husband—which would lead her to murder her children and the Corinthian royal family through magical means. This evolution of Medea’s character from a neutral mythic figure to a murderous foreign witch was no coincidence. By the Classical period, depictions of foreign women as vengeful, destructive witches were ubiquitous in Athenian theater.2 This portrayal stemmed from the growing anti-Persian sentiment of the Classical Period; the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BCE had left the Athenians with a strong resentment for anything foreign or barbarian (barbaros) in nature. The concept of magic had been introduced to the Greeks through Persian magoi, who were religious priests under the Persian empire, which resulted in a negative association forming between the practice and foreignness.3 However, this association did not occur equally along gender lines; Athenian plays depicted foreign women as magical far more often than they did foreign men. -
Curriculum Vitae
1 Curriculum Vitae HELENE PEET FOLEY Department of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, New York 10027. Tel. 212-854-2852. Fax 212-854-7491. Email. [email protected]. Education Swarthmore College: B.A. 1964 Yale University: M.A.T. (English) 1966 Yale University: M.A. (Classics) 1967 Harvard University: P.H.D. (Classics) 1975 Honors and Awards Elected as member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008 Sather Classical Lecturer at Berkeley for 2007-08 Loeb Library Classical Foundation Grant, Fall 2005 Astor Visiting Lecturer at Oxford, May 1998 Martin Classical Lecturer, Oberlin College 1995 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1992 NEH Fellowship, 1991 Grants declined: ACLS 1991, National Humanities Center 1991, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Princeton (for fall 2005) The Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching - Stanford, Fall 1976 American Philological Association Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics - December 1982 The Emily Gregory Award (for outstanding teaching)- Barnard 1989 Women's Classical Caucus award for the best essay of the previous year (for the interpretive essay in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter)- 1995 Co-recipient of an NEH grant (with Sarah B. Pomeroy and Natalie Kampen) to conduct an Institute on Women in Antiquity in the summer of 1983 Junior Faculty Mellon Research Grant - Stanford, Spring 1978 Junior Faculty Mellon Research Grant - Barnard, Fall 1980 Teaching and Administrative Experience Teaching North Haven High School, North Haven, Connecticut -
Homer's Odyssey
Checklist for revising Year 1 Suggestions for how to revise each area Revision Homer’s completed? Odyssey OR Homer, the Watch these interviews/ lectures and make notes on what you learn about the poet, the epic genre itself and Homer’s influence/the way others viewed his poetry. Homeric tradition, • ‘The Homeric Tradition’ from scholar Edith Hall at the British Library: Homeric Question https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNKiQiDgNJs • ‘The Homeric Question’ by scholar Pelling: and ancient Greek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zMiiq4JhXs epic poetry • ‘The Odyssey-In Our Time’ podcast from Melvyn Bragg and scholars Edith Hall, Goldhill and Taplin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSqxgB5NTUg • ‘Why Homer matters’ a lecture from scholar Cartledge at the Hay Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhXTEETdkmk The plot of each • Read the Odyssey again and make chapter plot summaries/timelines for the context chapters: 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 chapter REMEMBER-these are the chapters 10 marks will come from and they will be the focus of 20 mark essays • Watch each chapter summary+analysis video in this playlist, to help you make detailed chapter summaries/timelines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV- a_AtlilM&list=PLz_ZtyOWL9BTT6cHpSFM3HnK9ongAYDBl Concept of heroism • Read over your notes in your folder to remind yourself about the characteristics of a Homeric Hero and Homeric Heroism in general. • Watch this useful video on Homeric Heroism: ‘What makes a Homeric Hero?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXTecz3PN18