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How Greek Is Roman Comedy?

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How Greek Is Roman Comedy? UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Travels through the Foreign Imaginary on the Plautine Stage Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/41b1t9b0 Author Menon, Deepti Publication Date 2020 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Travels through the Foreign Imaginary on the Plautine Stage A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Deepti R. Menon Committee in charge: Professor Dorota Dutsch, Chair Professor Francis Dunn Professor Claudio Fogu Professor Jon Snyder March 2020 The Dissertation of Deepti R. Menon is approved. Francis Dunn Claudio Fogu Jon Snyder Dorota Dutsch, Committee Chair February 2020 Travels through the Foreign Imaginary on the Plautine Stage Copyright 2020 by Deepti R. Menon iii To my grandfather, M. Satyapal, who read all my undergraduate papers. I wish you could have seen this one. iv Acknowledgments - First, to my advisor, Dorota Dutsch, for support, patience, good humor, and for teaching me that most problems are less daunting after a good cup of tea. Thank you for believing in me on hard days, for giving me the opportunity to challenge myself, and for being enthusiastic about my projects and interests. It’s been an honor to call you professor, mentor, and friend. - To my committee, Francis Dunn, Jon Snyder, and Claudio Fogu, for reading my work and many earlier iterations of it, for careful and incisive questions and thought provoking suggestions. - To Catherine Nesci and Dominique Jullien, for being great chairs in Comparative Literature. I am so grateful for the ways in which you nurtured my interests and found ways for me to become a better scholar. - To my professors at UCSB, for intelligent, stimulating courses and discussions, office hours, encouragement, and conversation. - To my friends in graduate school; especially Aerynn, Olga, Rachel, Kirsten, Adam, Allene: you made coming to work fun. Thanks for the company, the friendship, and the laughter. To Tejas, thanks for making the office feel like home and especially for coming to my defense - there’s no one I would have rather had there. - To my professors at UVM - for intellectual warmth in the frozen north; especially Angeline Chiu, for joy and passion in teaching, for encouragement during the writing process, for cookie advents and Christmas cards, for everything. - To my professors at UC Davis - Bruce Anderson, Emily Albu, Antonella Bassi, Margherita Heyer-Caput, Patricia Bulman (requiescat in pace), John Rundin, Carey Seal, Rex Stem, and David Traill. You stoked my love of languages and laid the foundations for me to write this, and I am forever grateful. v - To Ammamma, for being the best grandmother anyone ever had, for always taking care of me, and for always being interested in my work. - To Amma and Papa, for all the support, all the encouragement, all the phone calls. I’m so happy you got to see this happen. - To my sister Aruna, for the care packages, for so many words of care and love, thank you forever. Your turn now! - To Shrivats, Olga, and all of Superwhack, the best friends I could ever have. There aren’t enough emojis to express my love. - To Kaushik, for proofing this times without end, for correctly suggesting "fewer words," for talking about Plautus with me for hours, for believing in this project and my ability to complete it, and for knowing when I needed a break. Thank you for supporting me and always lifting my spirits. I love you. vi DEEPTI R. MENON EDUCATION 2020 PhD – University of California, Santa Barbara 2019 Institute of World Literature – Harvard University 2014 M.A. in Greek and Latin – University of Vermont 2010 B.A. (honors) in French, Italian, Classical Civilization – University of California, Davis FELLOWSHIPS & AWARDS 2018-19 Graduate Humanities Research Fellowship 2013-14 Geneviève and Pierre Delattre Fellowship. Department of French and Italian University of California, Santa Barbara 2011-13 Lattie F. Coor Fellowship, University of Vermont ACADEMIC SERVICE 2018-2019 Moderator for Graduate Student Writing Group, UCSB 2017-2018 Lead Teaching Assistant for Comparative Literature Department, UCSB 2015-present Social Media Coordinator for Comparative Literature Department, UCSB 2014-2015 Student Representative to Comparative Literature Board, UCSB BOOK REVIEWS 2017 Review of R. T. Gonçalves, Performative Plautus: Sophistics, Metatheater, and Translation, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review TEACHING EXPERIENCE 2019 Reader, “Introduction to Italian Cultures” 2018 Instructor of record, “Translation theory and practice, from the Classical Antiquity to the Present day” 2018 Teaching assistant, “European Literature from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages” 2017 Teaching assistant, “From Homer to Harlequin: Masculine, Feminine, and the Romance” 2016 Instructor of record, “European Literature, from the Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages” 2015-6 Sole classroom instructor, “Intermediate French” 2013-5 Sole classroom instructor, “Elementary French” 2016-7 Teaching assistant, “Greek mythology” 2015 Teaching assistant, “Roman comedy and satire” 2015 Reader, “Dante’s Divine Comedy” 2015 Reader, “How to Make Italians” 2014 Reader, “Italian Cinema and the Universal Language of Rome” 2013 Reader “Italian Renaissance Comedy” vii COLLOQUIA AND CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2017 “Controlling women, founding the city: the role of Prokne in Aristophanes' Birds,” International Graduate Conference in Greek Comedy, Queen’s College, Oxford 2017 “Staging the Foreign: a look at Plautus’ Curculio,” Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Midwest and South, Ontario 2015 “King of the Jungle: an Examination of the Lion in Marie de France's Fables,” Center for Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference, Santa Barbara 2014 “Welcome Wanderer or Imperial Invader? Charikleia in Heliodorus’s Aethiopika,” Graduate Center for Literary Research, Santa Barbara viii Abstract Travels through the Foreign Imaginary on the Plautine Stage by Deepti R. Menon Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Dorota Dutsch, Chair This dissertation explores the ways in which Plautus’s comedies, inherently translated works, negotiate foreign characters and foreignness within their hybrid theatrical and extra-theatrical spaces. This project is part of a larger discourse on the tension between Greek, Roman, and non-Greek foreign elements in Plautus’s comedies. The three plays I analyze above display foreignness through particular theatrical elements: Curculio’s stage situations, Poenulus’s characters, and Persa’s use of props and spatial vocabulary. In all of these elements, two things are brought into prominence: the negotiations of identity and the use of what I call “foreign imaginary,” both of which show the ultimate breakdown of any dichotomy between the foreign and the familiar. I have coined the term “foreign imaginary” to refer to the foreign parts of the world which exist just out of sight of the audience, offstage. The foreign imaginary is almost always brought into a play when a character or object appears onstage. Moreover, it is usually an object which is considered distantly foreign (a coin with an elephant on it, as seen in the Curculio, or a tiara and a pair of fancy slippers, as in the Persa), and frequently resolves a major conflict within the play. However, we must not forget that at least some of the ix “ordinary” Greek characters appeared from the same entrances onstage. It is therefore possible that the lines between “foreign,” “imaginary/foreign” “familiar,” “domestic,” or any other demarcations, are (or should be) blurred. This constant renegotiation of categories and boundaries is what leads me to a Bhabhaian reading of Plautine comedy. This study comprises a close reading and analysis of three plays which demonstrate Plautus’s use of the foreign imaginary: the Curculio, the Persa, and the Poenulus. I show through the lens of theory that elements of Plautine comedy reflect a contemporaneous discourse between the familial and the foreign. While Plautine comedy predates European colonialism by at least two millennia, hybridity as defined by Homi Bhabha offers a useful lens for examining Roman comedy. Bhabha views hybridized culture as an ever-changing phenomenon comprised of moments of negotiation between cultures. We see in the chaotic period of Plautus’s career that Plautus is not writing from within a “Graeco-Roman” landscape fixed in time from which interested parties may pick out what is Greek and what is Roman. Instead, he deals with a ‘third space’ which is constantly in flux — a moment within which cultures communicate and are negotiated. Theater in Rome is a Greek import featuring adaptations of Greek plays ostensibly set in Greek cities peopled by “Greeks” who speak Latin and are familiar with Roman laws. The panoply of stock characters and conventions that Roman comedy has inherited from Greek comedy already has a value system that is neither exclusively Greek nor exclusively Roman. The uncertainty that surrounds Plautus’s theater makes taking the Bhabhaian approach feel particularly appropriate – the play is both Roman and foreign, its stage both present and evanescent, its context political and private by turns. My study of Plautus analyzes these singular elements to offer
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