Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Medea Costume Design Concept, Annie Wolfzorn

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Euripides’s Medea is a story about a woman’s heart being poisoned with pain and grief. Her pain demands to be felt and her grief demands to be heard. Over time, the grief sours from longing for her own death to longing for the death of others. Medea longs to ease the pain of her grief with an act of revenge. This grief is in response to her husband shattering the beautiful love they once shared. Consequently, he earns a cruel and devastating punishment—the brutal murder of his second wife, Glauce, her father, Creon, and his two children. In the process …

This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus' Gender In Translation And Performance, August Guszkowski

Independent Student Projects and Publications

This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus’ Gender in Translation and Performance explores the possible interpretation of the character of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae as genderqueer, specifically nonbinary. The project consists of a translation of the Bacchae from Ancient Greek into English which pays special attention to instances where Dionysus’ character is treated as somewhere between or outside of the traditional male-female gender binary, including placing emphasis on the god’s “effeminate” appearance and ability to influence other people to act across gendered lines. The groundbreaking translation refers to Dionysus with they/them pronouns rather than the traditional he/him and embraces this surprisingly well-evidenced reading …

Divine Deliverance A New Look At Euripidean Tragedy Through Audience Interpretation, Samantha Pukys

Honors Bachelor of Arts

This study consists of a literary analysis of two Euripidean plays to explore audience reception. Hippolytus is the first tragic work I will examine, and it was performed in 428 BCE, three years after the start of the war; the final work I will examine, the Bacchae, which was also Euripides’ final play, was performed in 405 BCE, one year before the end of the war. A literary, specifically semiotic, analysis of the divine characters can provide insight into the audience’s reception of the plays. That is, by examining the symbols within the text, one can begin to understand …

Art And Rebellion In Medea And Pleasantville, Annika Phillips

CIE Essay Writing Contest

No abstract provided.

The Curse As A Garment In Greek Tragedy, Judith Fletcher

Ancient Studies Faculty Publications

This article considers how Greek tragedy adapts the metaphor of the curse as a garment used in Ancient Near Eastern rituals and treaties. Using this comparative material, I analyze the fatal garments used by female characters in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and Euripides’ Medea.

Taking On The Man: Female Rebellion Against Gender Roles In Classical Greek Drama, Gabrielle Killough

Senior Honors Theses

The portrayal of women in Ancient Greek drama seems at times opposed to the societal gender roles within Classical Athens. In the plays, women are strong and dynamic figures who enact change and upheaval in their world. Ancient dramas, like Agamemnon, Medea, Antigone, and Lysistrata, portrayed women with strong autonomy and minds which matched their male counterparts; whereas the women in Classical Athens found themselves in more limited circumstances. In analyzing the nature of these disparities, it seems that the constant factor is that the plays concern the violation of the household. The female characters respond in one of …

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Athens: Euripides On The Freudian Couch, Brendan C. Chisholm

Honors Bachelor of Arts

Freud’s theories suggest that authors often describe aspects of their own self-image, or their interpretation of the people around them, in individual characters or themes. Using this idea, I will perform a psychological study of characters and themes in four of Euripides’ plays, the Medea, Bacchae, Hecuba, and Trojan Women, then apply Freud’s Dream Work theory to conclusions about the plays in an effort to open a window into the psychology of Euripides himself.

Rain Inside The Elevator: Dualities In The Plays Of Sarah Ruhl As Seen Through The Lens Of Ancient Greek Theatre, Hannah Fattor

Summer Research

Considering the modern playwright Sarah Ruhl’s current body of work through the paradigm of ancient Greek theatrical tradition illuminates many links to Greek theatre and highlights the depth of the emotions within her plays. The ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, along with Ruhl, confront themes of love and death with both sorrow and humor, considering the different ways people cope with traumatic circumstances. They focus in particular on the relationships that form between people after a significant loss, and how humans come together in a community, seeking connection with each other. By theatrically exploring the themes of …

A Creative And Scholarly Exploration Of Edna Obrien’S Iphigenia, Danya Gee Martin

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I will document the creative work I completed for my Senior Acting Project. I will also explore my Senior Acting Project from a more ‘conventional’ academic standpoint. I will explore various definitions of tragedy and argue my own definition; I will also investigate who Euripides was as a writer and human being. I will then apply my findings to three different versions of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis: a classical translation, a more contemporary translation, and the adaptation I performed for my SAP. I will argue whether or not each meets my criteria for a tragedy, …

An Exemplary Heroine In The Hippolytos, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

In this paper I examine the link between cultic and dramatic heroes, and more particularly the status of cult heroes as exemplary figures for protagonists in tragedy. A hero in ancient Greek cultural terms is a human being who becomes heroized after death, a figure of cult, that is, who requires worship and sacrifice. Heroes are also central to epic and tragedy, yet because of the local nature of hero cults, heroes' status as objects of worship is rarely explicit in poetry. Poets typically avoid references to particular local practices, and focus instead on the figure of the hero before …

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 …

The "Ultra-Modern" Euripides Of Verrall, H.D., And Macleish, Thomas E. Jenkins

Classical Studies Faculty Research

This essay explores the modernity of ancient Greece. If this concept seems a paradox, it is; and it is that tension between antiquity and modernity, between constructions of classical rationalism and modern angst, that fueled three extraordinary adaptations of Euripides from the early 1890s to the mid 1960s. Drawing on a perception of Euripides as the most "modern" of ancient (perhaps even modern!) playwrights, A. W. Verrall, H(ilda) D(oolittle), and Archibald MacLeish all fashioned Euripides-inspired works that challenged contemporary perceptions of Euripides as a classic. As H.D. explains in her Notes on Euripides, "[W]e are too apt to pigeon-hole …

Wiping Blood From The Walls: Medea’S Pleasures Of Terror, Clark Lunberry

English Faculty Research and Scholarship

I was there and then I wasn’t. The actors were before me and then they weren’t. The curtain opened, it closed, and—in the play of appearances and disappearances—something was seen in the vanishings. Remaining, what I now write is a kind of recollected narrative, a reportorial account of British director Deborah Warner’s recent adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. As a member of its audience one evening, I look back from the strict vantage of the remembered event, from the dual perspective of having seen the performance, but of seeing it no longer, of having been a spectator to the play, but …

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 …