[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Lecture: February 16, 2012

Dimitri H. Gondicas gondicas at Princeton.EDU
Thu Feb 9 08:08:57 PST 2012


PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Lecture



Dionysus and Divine Violence:

Theatricality and Spectatorship in The Bacchae







Olga Taxidou

University of Edinburgh

This paper revisits The Bacchae in an attempt to trace an aesthetics of cruelty for performance that it claims has been partly shaped by this play and its reception by the philosophies and the theatres of modernity. It will focus on the centrality of violence in this play and propose the concept of Divine Violence, borrowed from Walter Benjamin's essay, Critique of Violence (1921). The Bacchae, the last extant tragedy - metatheatrical, apocalyptic and spectacular - a play that rehearses the birth of tragedy while heralding its death, can also be seen to rehearse the difficult relationship between tragedy and philosophy.



Olga Taxidou teaches drama and performance studies at the University of Edinburgh, Department of English Department. Her books include The Mask: a Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (1998), Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (2004), Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (2007); she has co-edited Modernism: an Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998). She is currently working on a book entitled Greek Tragedy and the Modernist Stage, which is based on lectures delivered in 2010 for the Onassis Foundation Senior Visiting Scholars Series. She also works on adaptations of Greek tragedies, some of which have been performed.



Thursday, February 16, 2012

6:00 p.m.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103



Cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts, Department of Classics,

and Program in Theater

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