This article analyzes Madeline Miller’s Circe in relation to the contemporary trend of women’s mythological retellings of marginalized female characters. Because of Circe’s first-person narrative, Miller’s book has been interpreted and marketed as empowering and feminist; however, Circe’s narrative structure rather reaffirms the ideological assumptions underlying the ‘masculine’ Bildungsroman, where the female character’s individual experience is defined by romance and she is ultimately excluded from the social scene. The dichotomy between the marketing rhetoric of empowerment and the novel’s actual narrative structure stimulates a broader reflection about the ideological implication of this novelistic trend as a whole. On the one hand, these novels exploit the well-established exemplary value of Graeco-Roman antiquity to offer a new version of the classical canon which accommodates the critiques of radical movements like feminism; on the other hand, they appropriate the progressive aura of such movements to secure a broader audience while in fact leaving power imbalances unquestioned.
{"title":"Circe, the female hero. First-person narrative and power in Madeline Miller’s Circe","authors":"Valeria Spacciante","doi":"10.1093/crj/clae011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clae011","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Madeline Miller’s Circe in relation to the contemporary trend of women’s mythological retellings of marginalized female characters. Because of Circe’s first-person narrative, Miller’s book has been interpreted and marketed as empowering and feminist; however, Circe’s narrative structure rather reaffirms the ideological assumptions underlying the ‘masculine’ Bildungsroman, where the female character’s individual experience is defined by romance and she is ultimately excluded from the social scene. The dichotomy between the marketing rhetoric of empowerment and the novel’s actual narrative structure stimulates a broader reflection about the ideological implication of this novelistic trend as a whole. On the one hand, these novels exploit the well-established exemplary value of Graeco-Roman antiquity to offer a new version of the classical canon which accommodates the critiques of radical movements like feminism; on the other hand, they appropriate the progressive aura of such movements to secure a broader audience while in fact leaving power imbalances unquestioned.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"203 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142258694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the online aesthetic ‘Dark Academia’ from the perspective of Classical reception. Dark Academia became popular during the COVID-19 era as an internet subculture revolving around bookishness, university culture, the Gothic, and the Classical. From its beginning as a Tumblr fandom around Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), Dark Academia has grown to reach millions of followers worldwide across numerous social media platforms. This article argues that we can think of Dark Academia’s reception of Classics as a ‘haunting’ as defined by James Uden in Spectres of Antiquity (2020), made up of fragmentary, disconnected references — similar to the reception of Classics in Gothic literature. Dark Academia’s reception, however, is twofold: a reception of Classical antiquity itself, but also of the academic discipline of Classics. As such, the field is twice implicated. Classics must address Dark Academia both as a potential gateway for attracting interest in the ancient world, but also as another phenomenon that reflects and amplifies its own pernicious disciplinary legacy.
{"title":"The haunting of classics in the Dark Academia aesthetic","authors":"Tori F Lee","doi":"10.1093/crj/clae007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clae007","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the online aesthetic ‘Dark Academia’ from the perspective of Classical reception. Dark Academia became popular during the COVID-19 era as an internet subculture revolving around bookishness, university culture, the Gothic, and the Classical. From its beginning as a Tumblr fandom around Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), Dark Academia has grown to reach millions of followers worldwide across numerous social media platforms. This article argues that we can think of Dark Academia’s reception of Classics as a ‘haunting’ as defined by James Uden in Spectres of Antiquity (2020), made up of fragmentary, disconnected references — similar to the reception of Classics in Gothic literature. Dark Academia’s reception, however, is twofold: a reception of Classical antiquity itself, but also of the academic discipline of Classics. As such, the field is twice implicated. Classics must address Dark Academia both as a potential gateway for attracting interest in the ancient world, but also as another phenomenon that reflects and amplifies its own pernicious disciplinary legacy.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141568171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kamila Shamsie’s (2017) novel Home Fire draws on Sophocles’ Antigone for its plot, but neither requires familiarity with, nor explicitly references, the tragedy. This article attempts to build a specific case for the effects of attending to the intertext by focusing on Shamsie’s complex treatment of Antigone’s punishment and its consequences in Sophocles. Reading the novel’s denouement in conversation with that of the tragedy suggests questions about higher authority and checks on political power in the world of the novel. I argue that shared stories in the novel exert a force analogous to that of Sophocles’ gods in that they authorize moral judgments; attention to the intertext enacts the same experience for readers of the novel that shared stories do for characters within the novel.
{"title":"‘Something Mythic’: The power of shared stories in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire","authors":"Clara Shaw Hardy","doi":"10.1093/crj/clae005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clae005","url":null,"abstract":"Kamila Shamsie’s (2017) novel Home Fire draws on Sophocles’ Antigone for its plot, but neither requires familiarity with, nor explicitly references, the tragedy. This article attempts to build a specific case for the effects of attending to the intertext by focusing on Shamsie’s complex treatment of Antigone’s punishment and its consequences in Sophocles. Reading the novel’s denouement in conversation with that of the tragedy suggests questions about higher authority and checks on political power in the world of the novel. I argue that shared stories in the novel exert a force analogous to that of Sophocles’ gods in that they authorize moral judgments; attention to the intertext enacts the same experience for readers of the novel that shared stories do for characters within the novel.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141166669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I present an analysis of the narrative discourses and literary elements found in the teknophagia story that originates with Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum and trace the development of those motifs in subsequent Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions of the story. I first outline the reception history of Josephus within medieval Coptic and Ethiopic literary traditions, by way of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon and one of its Latin sources, the De Excidio Hierosolymitano. I then illustrate how the literariness of the various authors who reworked the teknophagia story influences a reading of the narrative discourses of each text. In doing so, I emphasize the unique iteration of the account of the cannibalistic mother that appears in the Christian-Arabic and Ethiopic histories, showing how this version of the story develops out of not only earlier stylistic changes, but also from the literary elements introduced into the story by the redactor of the Arabic reworking of the Hebrew Yosippon.
{"title":"Narrativity and literariness in receptions of Josephus’s teknophagia story","authors":"Yonatan Binyam","doi":"10.1093/crj/clae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clae002","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I present an analysis of the narrative discourses and literary elements found in the teknophagia story that originates with Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum and trace the development of those motifs in subsequent Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions of the story. I first outline the reception history of Josephus within medieval Coptic and Ethiopic literary traditions, by way of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon and one of its Latin sources, the De Excidio Hierosolymitano. I then illustrate how the literariness of the various authors who reworked the teknophagia story influences a reading of the narrative discourses of each text. In doing so, I emphasize the unique iteration of the account of the cannibalistic mother that appears in the Christian-Arabic and Ethiopic histories, showing how this version of the story develops out of not only earlier stylistic changes, but also from the literary elements introduced into the story by the redactor of the Arabic reworking of the Hebrew Yosippon.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140148688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the power of silence in the feminist recovery of classical texts to open up engaged spaces for women’s creative reworkings, taking as a case study Lavinia and her reception in Ursula Le Guin’s (2008) novel of the same name. By re-evaluating silence in dialogue with feminist and classical reception scholarship, I argue that Le Guin is able to bring a different angle to the reception of classical literary women, focusing on the gaps and spaces in Lavinia’s character that provide a medium for engagement with the incomplete text of the Aeneid. Silence thus becomes a locus in which Le Guin can transform Vergil’s silencing of Lavinia into a generative vision of the open space of interpretation available in classical literature and its reception.
本文以乌苏拉-勒奎恩(Ursula Le Guin,2008 年)的同名小说《拉维尼娅》(Lavinia)及其对她的接受为案例,探讨了在女性主义对古典文本的复原过程中,沉默的力量为女性的创造性再创作开辟了参与空间。通过与女性主义和古典文学接受研究进行对话,重新评估沉默,我认为勒奎恩能够从另一个角度看待古典文学女性的接受问题,重点关注拉维尼娅性格中的空白和空间,这些空白和空间为与《埃涅伊德》不完整文本的接触提供了媒介。因此,沉默成为勒奎恩将维吉尔对拉维尼娅的沉默转化为对古典文学及其接受的开放性阐释空间的一种生成性视角。
{"title":"‘Back from the silence with something to say’: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and silence as classical reception","authors":"Emily Hauser","doi":"10.1093/crj/clae001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clae001","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the power of silence in the feminist recovery of classical texts to open up engaged spaces for women’s creative reworkings, taking as a case study Lavinia and her reception in Ursula Le Guin’s (2008) novel of the same name. By re-evaluating silence in dialogue with feminist and classical reception scholarship, I argue that Le Guin is able to bring a different angle to the reception of classical literary women, focusing on the gaps and spaces in Lavinia’s character that provide a medium for engagement with the incomplete text of the Aeneid. Silence thus becomes a locus in which Le Guin can transform Vergil’s silencing of Lavinia into a generative vision of the open space of interpretation available in classical literature and its reception.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"179 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139679840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Afterword addresses the efforts of Italian fascists to build an imaginary fascist community through the mythical appropriation of the past. It argues that fascism epitomized in a peculiarly contradictory and destructive manner the moderns’ reaction to what they perceived as the end of an era. The historical division between memory and history, established in the nineteenth century, engulfed the fascist movement and overlapped with other critical dichotomies that vexed Mussolini and his adepts as they pursued the revitalization of communal roots while simultaneously riding the train of change. The dualisms of community and society, tradition and modernity, and, at a more meta-level, sacred and profane confronted fascism with difficult dilemmas, eliciting responses that, as the contributors to this issue show, ultimately exposed fascism’s cultural incongruities and fallacies.
{"title":"Afterword: memory and the past: fascism, spectacle, history","authors":"Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad023","url":null,"abstract":"The Afterword addresses the efforts of Italian fascists to build an imaginary fascist community through the mythical appropriation of the past. It argues that fascism epitomized in a peculiarly contradictory and destructive manner the moderns’ reaction to what they perceived as the end of an era. The historical division between memory and history, established in the nineteenth century, engulfed the fascist movement and overlapped with other critical dichotomies that vexed Mussolini and his adepts as they pursued the revitalization of communal roots while simultaneously riding the train of change. The dualisms of community and society, tradition and modernity, and, at a more meta-level, sacred and profane confronted fascism with difficult dilemmas, eliciting responses that, as the contributors to this issue show, ultimately exposed fascism’s cultural incongruities and fallacies.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139461507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This contribution aims to analyse the role of music in the revival of Greek theatre that characterized twentieth-century Italy. In particular, it explores and compares the music composed for INDA productions between 1921 and 1939. From the beginning of the festival, music occupied a crucial role, thanks to Ettore Romagnoli’s emphasis on the musical component in reviving ancient Greek drama. The years from 1921 to 1927 were characterized by the collaboration between Romagnoli and Giuseppe Mulè, who attempted to revive ancient Greek music according to modern criteria. By 1930, the festival, run by an entirely Fascist committee, had taken on a nationalistic character, and music was integral to this. Indeed, during these years (1930–39), music acquired a pivotal role in emphasizing the heroic instances of ancient drama that had become functional to the Regime’s policy. Moreover, it was considered indispensable for this increasingly mass-oriented type of performance.
{"title":"Ancient tragedy, yet modern music: musical compositions in the classical performances (1921–39)","authors":"Giovanna Casali","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This contribution aims to analyse the role of music in the revival of Greek theatre that characterized twentieth-century Italy. In particular, it explores and compares the music composed for INDA productions between 1921 and 1939. From the beginning of the festival, music occupied a crucial role, thanks to Ettore Romagnoli’s emphasis on the musical component in reviving ancient Greek drama. The years from 1921 to 1927 were characterized by the collaboration between Romagnoli and Giuseppe Mulè, who attempted to revive ancient Greek music according to modern criteria. By 1930, the festival, run by an entirely Fascist committee, had taken on a nationalistic character, and music was integral to this. Indeed, during these years (1930–39), music acquired a pivotal role in emphasizing the heroic instances of ancient drama that had become functional to the Regime’s policy. Moreover, it was considered indispensable for this increasingly mass-oriented type of performance.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"74 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139454554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Russian dancer and film actress Jia Ruskaja (Evgeniya Borisenko, 1902–70) forged a rapidly rising career in Italy as a dancer, teacher and company director during the thirties. The author of La danza come un modo di essere (1927) was a female education reformer, whose Milan dance schools were subsidized by the Fascist Regime. In 1940, she was entrusted with the directorship of the newly founded Royal School for Classical Dance. Though inspired by Isadora Duncan, in the early thirties, Ruskaja added ballet to her modern dance since she considered it crucial for the sound training of the body. According to her, the century-old codified system of ballet, once mingled with the ability to make artfully crafted movements inspired by classical imagery (‘plastique’) and rhythmic gymnastics, could transform into a new and organic physical practice, able to create a new beginning in dance. Was this so? Could her modernized ballet, imbued with the Mediterranean myth that inspired a number of artists in the twenties and thirties, convey such a modernist futural thrust, or was it rather held captive by centuries-old balletic values and culture?
俄罗斯舞蹈家和电影演员贾-鲁斯卡亚(Evgeniya Borisenko,1902-70 年)作为舞蹈家、教师和舞蹈团团长,30 年代在意大利迅速崛起。La danza come un modo di essere》(1927 年)的作者是一位女性教育改革家,她在米兰开办的舞蹈学校得到了法西斯政权的资助。1940 年,她被任命为新成立的皇家古典舞蹈学校的校长。虽然受到伊莎多拉-邓肯的启发,但在 30 年代初,卢斯卡雅在现代舞中加入了芭蕾,因为她认为芭蕾对身体的健全训练至关重要。她认为,拥有百年历史的芭蕾舞编排系统,一旦与从古典意象("plastique")和韵律体操中汲取灵感、经过艺术加工的动作相融合,就能转化为一种全新的、有机的身体练习,开创舞蹈的新起点。果真如此吗?她的现代化芭蕾舞剧充满了地中海神话的气息,在二十世纪二三十年代激发了许多艺术家的灵感,她的芭蕾舞剧能否传达出这样一种现代主义的未来主义主旨,还是说,她的芭蕾舞剧被几个世纪以来的芭蕾价值和文化所束缚?
{"title":"Classical dance and Mediterranean imaginaries: Jia Ruskaja in Fascist Italy","authors":"Patrizia Veroli","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Russian dancer and film actress Jia Ruskaja (Evgeniya Borisenko, 1902–70) forged a rapidly rising career in Italy as a dancer, teacher and company director during the thirties. The author of La danza come un modo di essere (1927) was a female education reformer, whose Milan dance schools were subsidized by the Fascist Regime. In 1940, she was entrusted with the directorship of the newly founded Royal School for Classical Dance. Though inspired by Isadora Duncan, in the early thirties, Ruskaja added ballet to her modern dance since she considered it crucial for the sound training of the body. According to her, the century-old codified system of ballet, once mingled with the ability to make artfully crafted movements inspired by classical imagery (‘plastique’) and rhythmic gymnastics, could transform into a new and organic physical practice, able to create a new beginning in dance. Was this so? Could her modernized ballet, imbued with the Mediterranean myth that inspired a number of artists in the twenties and thirties, convey such a modernist futural thrust, or was it rather held captive by centuries-old balletic values and culture?","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"6 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139456243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Italian classicist Ettore Romagnoli (1871–938) is mostly remembered as a popularizer of ancient drama through his work as a translator for and artistic director of classical performances at the Greek theatre of Syracuse (1914–27). His theatrical productions were inspired by a programmatic aesthetic approach to the study of classical culture called ‘artistic Hellenism’, which aimed at making the Graeco-Roman classics accessible to a broader audience, as well as renewing Italian prose theatre by referring to the example of the ancient chorodidaskalos. This article aims to describe Romagnoli’s attempt to promote his aesthetics in the staging of Greek drama within the cultural framework of Fascism. Even after his dismissal from the artistic direction of the National Institute of Ancient Drama, which he helped to establish in 1925, Romagnoli strove to find the financial support for his project of a ‘Fascist Institute of Classical Drama’. This Institute never became a reality and was probably intended to compete with the classical productions staged at Syracuse, which in the thirties were undergoing a shift in terms of aesthetics and production management according to the new Fascist politics about theatre matters.
{"title":"Ettore Romagnoli, rievocatore of ancient Greek drama","authors":"Sara Troiani","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad029","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Italian classicist Ettore Romagnoli (1871–938) is mostly remembered as a popularizer of ancient drama through his work as a translator for and artistic director of classical performances at the Greek theatre of Syracuse (1914–27). His theatrical productions were inspired by a programmatic aesthetic approach to the study of classical culture called ‘artistic Hellenism’, which aimed at making the Graeco-Roman classics accessible to a broader audience, as well as renewing Italian prose theatre by referring to the example of the ancient chorodidaskalos. This article aims to describe Romagnoli’s attempt to promote his aesthetics in the staging of Greek drama within the cultural framework of Fascism. Even after his dismissal from the artistic direction of the National Institute of Ancient Drama, which he helped to establish in 1925, Romagnoli strove to find the financial support for his project of a ‘Fascist Institute of Classical Drama’. This Institute never became a reality and was probably intended to compete with the classical productions staged at Syracuse, which in the thirties were undergoing a shift in terms of aesthetics and production management according to the new Fascist politics about theatre matters.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"8 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139458326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the aesthetic means employed in classical performances produced by the Institute of Ancient Drama (INDA) in Syracuse between 1914 and 1930, with a particular focus on performances of Aeschylus’ tragedies. The first part of this study traces the influences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde movements on the Syracusan project, including the experiments pioneered by the radical French gauche, the German productions directed by Hans Oberländer with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf in the role of dramaturg and translator, as well as Max Reinhardt’s early engagements with ancient Greek drama and his vision of theatre (particularly his Theatre of the Five Thousand). It then discusses the aesthetic trajectory that productions of ancient Greek drama, and more specifically those of Aeschylus’ plays, underwent from INDA’s beginnings in 1914–30, when an all-fascist governing body was installed at its helm.
{"title":"Constructing a Hellenic modernism: Aeschylus at the ancient theatre of Syracuse (1914–30)","authors":"Giovanna Di Martino","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the aesthetic means employed in classical performances produced by the Institute of Ancient Drama (INDA) in Syracuse between 1914 and 1930, with a particular focus on performances of Aeschylus’ tragedies. The first part of this study traces the influences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde movements on the Syracusan project, including the experiments pioneered by the radical French gauche, the German productions directed by Hans Oberländer with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf in the role of dramaturg and translator, as well as Max Reinhardt’s early engagements with ancient Greek drama and his vision of theatre (particularly his Theatre of the Five Thousand). It then discusses the aesthetic trajectory that productions of ancient Greek drama, and more specifically those of Aeschylus’ plays, underwent from INDA’s beginnings in 1914–30, when an all-fascist governing body was installed at its helm.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":"6 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139456214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}