Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple Of Dionysus And Queer Fear Of The Feminine, C. Heike Schotten

Political Science Faculty Publication Series

This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's …

Euripides' Second Thoughts, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics Faculty Publication Series

Euripides' extant Hippolytus was a rare "re-production" of an earlier play on the same mythic episode. The play contains a series of metadramatic comments on its partial interchange of Phaedra's and the Nurse's original roles. The Nurse's appearance in the "Stephanias" as seducer of a virtuous Phaedra is presented as a "change of mind." Her "second thoughts" (to corrupt, rather than dissuade Phaedra) mirror the playwright's decision to amend a shameless Phaedra's character by, conversely, degenerating the Nurse's. His covert comments on this strategy of reversal underline the oddity of his decision to correct his first try at the story.

Double Meaning And Mythic Novelty In Euripides' Plays, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics Faculty Publication Series

The mythic tradition of dle Greeks is protean. Each of the vast number of stories is itself variable, appearing now in one form, now in another, often standing alongside other versions which it flatly contradicts. Critical study of this remarkable tradition is doubly vexed, firSt by received myth's intrinsically fluid nature, then by the fragmentary preservation of mythic source material.

Medea Line 37: A Note, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics Faculty Publication Series

A recent article by R. P. Winnington-Ingram elucidates Euripides' penchant for clever "jokes" at the expense of the literary traditions or the stage conventions within which he worked. While Winnington-Ingram voices some trepidation that other critics may find his identification of such levity in a great tragedian "repugnant or even abhorrent," his assessment of these witticisms, which (in a play on the word's current and etymological meanings) he dubs "sophisticated," has offered insight into Euripides' artistry and inspired further study along similar lines, notably by Geoffrey Amott.

A keynote of the examples of cleverness noted by these scholars is their …

Euripides And The Decline Of Character: A Soap Opera Connection, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics Faculty Publication Series

To the Greeks of the fifth century, the heroes and heroines of myth, the villains and villainesses--even the sorcerers and monsters--were figures from history, or at least historical legend. Surely the sophisticated Athenian of the fifth century did not believe in a literal interpretation of Scylla and Charybdis any more than we do, nor that Odysseus actually underwent every single setback and adventure retailed in the Odyssey. But, just as surely, he believed that there had been an Odysseus, just as implicitly as we believe in George Washington or Richard the Lion-Hearted. Unlike us, however, he also had an intimate …