Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning

Olga Taxidou

Edinburgh University Press, 2004 - Literary Criticism - 215 pages

This powerful reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative - the physical and civic - dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idealist, humanist, and universalist approaches that have informed our most cherished philosophical, psychoanalytical, and modern interpretations of Greek tragedy and, in doing so, asks us to renew our relation to these works and to our literary and philosophical inheritance.The book reassesses tragic form in relation to Athenian democracy and links it with a performative discourse that both excludes the feminine and relies on civic and private forms of mourning. At the same time, it explores the centrality of tragedy for thinkers of Modernity such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Brecht and Benjamin. Through a persuasive analysis of both classical theorists - Plato and Aristotle - and modern theorists - Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida and Butler - the book significantly shifts the emphasis from a Sophoclean model of tragedy to a Euripidean one. Close readings of the performance aspects of Greek play-texts help illuminate these ideas.Features* Compelling new interpretation of Greek tragedy * Performance based * Attentive to issues of gender

About the author

Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has published extensively on modernism and performance, on the work of Edward Gordon Craig and on relationships between Greek tragedy and the philosophies of modernity. Her works include Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht(2007); Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning(2004); The Mask: a Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig(1998, 2002). She is co-editor with Vassiliki Kolocotroni of The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism(2018, pk, 2020) and with Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Jane Goldman, Modernism: an Anthology of Sources and Documents(1998, 2000). She has held Visiting Professorships at New York University. She writes adaptations of Greek tragedies; her Medeawas recently directed by Lee Breuer with Maude Mitchell and produced by Mabou Mines theatre company in New York (2018).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning
• Author: Olga Taxidou
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2004
• ISBN: 0748619879, 9780748619870
• Length: 215 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / Drama; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Social Science / Anthropology / General