Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy: Sarah Olsen: Bloomsbury Academic

Queer Euripides

Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy

Queer Euripides

Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy

Description

This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays have long been seen as a valuable source for understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, scholars of Greek tragedy have only recently begun to engage with queer theory and its ongoing developments. Queer Euripides represents a vital step in exploring the productive perspectives on classical literature afforded by the critical study of orientations, identities, affects and experiences that unsettle not only prescriptive understandings of gender and sexuality, but also normative social structures and relations more broadly.

Bringing together twenty-one chapters by experts in classical studies, English literature, performance and critical theory, this carefully curated collection of incisive and provocative readings of each surviving play draws upon queer models of temporality, subjectivity, feeling, relationality and poetic form to consider "queerness" both as and beyond sexuality. Rather than adhering to a single school of thought, these close readings showcase the multiple ways in which queer theory opens up new vantage points on the politics, aesthetics and performative force of Euripidean drama. They further demonstrate how the analytical frameworks developed by queer theorists in the last thirty years deeply resonate with the ways in which Euripides' plays twist poetic form in order to challenge well-established modes of the social. By establishing how Greek tragedy can itself be a resource for theorizing queerness, the book sets the stage for a new model of engaging with ancient literature, which challenges current interpretive methods, explores experimental paradigms, and reconceptualizes the practice of reading to place it firmly at the center of the interpretive act.

List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments

Queer Euripides: An Introduction (Sarah Olsen, Williams College, USA and Mario Telò, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Part I. Temporalities
1. Hippolytus: Euripides and Queer Theory at the Fin de Siècle and Now (Daniel Orrells, King's College, London, UK)
2. Rhesus: Tragic Wilderness in Queer Time (Oliver Baldwin, University of Reading, UK)
3. Trojan Women: No Futures (Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)

Part II. Escape/Refusal
4. Iphigenia in Aulis: Perhaps (Not) (Ella Haselswerdt, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
5. Helen: Queering the Barbarian (Patrice Rankine, University of Richmond, USA)
6. Children of Heracles: Queer Kinship: Profit, Vivisection, Kitsch (Ben Radcliffe, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA)
7. Suppliant Women: Adrastus's Cute Lesbianism: Labor Irony Adhesion (Mario Telò, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Part III: Failure
8. Medea: Failure and the Queer Escape (Sarah Nooter, University of Chicago, USA)
9. Alcestis: Impossible Performance (Sean Gurd, University of Missouri, USA)
10. Ion: Into the Queer Ionisphere (Kirk Ormand, Oberlin College, USA)

Part IV: Relations
11. Heracles: Homosexual Panic and Irresponsible Reading (Alastair Blanshard, University of Queensland, Australia)
12. Andromache: Catfight in Phthia (Sarah Olsen, Williams College, USA)
13. Orestes: Polymorphously Per-verse: On Queer Metrology (David Youd, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Part V. Reproduction
14. Hecuba: The Dead Child or Queer for a Day (Karen Bassi, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
15. Phoenician Women: “Deviant” Thebans Out of Time (Rosa Andújar, Kings' College, London, UK)
16. Electra: Parapoetics and Paraontology (Melissa Mueller, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA)

Part VI: Encounters
17. Iphigenia in Tauris: Iphigenia and Artemis? Reading Queer/Performing Queer
(Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Hamilton College, USA and David Bullen, Royal Holloway, UK)
18. Cyclops: A Philosopher Walks into a Satyr Play (Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Part VII: Transitions
19. Hippolytus: Queer Crossings: Following Anne Carson (Jonathan Goldberg, Emory University, USA)
20. Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria: Reality and the Egg: An Oviparody of Euripides (L. Deihr, UC, Berkeley, USA)
21. Bacchae: “An Excessively High Price to Pay for Being Reluctant to Emerge from the Closet?” (Isabel Ruffell, University of Glasgow, UK)

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Product details

Published	Apr 07 2022
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	288
ISBN	9781350249639
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reading Queer Euripides from start to finish feels like receiving an invitation to a conversation, a collective, an in-crowd, a protest, a manifesto for change ... I feel deeply grateful to the editors of Queer Euripides and to its contributors for this volume that in its reckoning with the failures of Classics is no less full to the brim with 'weedy hope'. I am trying to imagine the landscapes that will grow from such endings.

The Classical Review
The surprise factors of these re-readings ... will constantly challenge our assumptions and force us to read the text with fresh eyes.

Journal of Classics Teaching
Full of innovative analyses of Euripides' plays, this ground-breaking volume is the first to employ queerness as a lens for examining the entire surviving corpus of an ancient Greek playwright. In both form and content it heralds a new approach to ancient texts that should have a deep impact on the field of Classics and reach many audiences beyond it.

Naomi A. Weiss, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, USA