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As specified in the organizer's statement, we are not submitting separate abstracts for these brief presentations.

The history of the dramatic chorus is one of decline in both capacity and centrality, and the altered position of the chorus has been labeled a most noticeable differences between Old and New Comedy (Maidment 1935; Csapo/Slater 1995). That we have no choral odes of Menander, whether because they were considered unworthy of publication or simply never existed, is an indubitable testament to the decline of the chorus apparent late in the fourth century.

In this talk, I look at specific evidence for the staging of the final scene of Clouds II, and discuss interpretative implications of possible stagings. There is now a significant body of scholarship arguing that Clouds II was written in order to be staged (Revermann 2006: 326-32, Biles 2011: 167-210, Marshall 2012), and there has been important work on staging of the final scene in particular (Kopff 1977, Harvey 1981, Revermann 2006: 224-6).

The Prometheus Bound presents many scholarly entanglements regarding its textual transmission and performance history. Issues of authorship, date, and staging have plagued larger questions of interpretation and meaning for this play. Griffith especially (1976, 1978, 1983, & 1984) has suggested that several peculiarities of Prometheus Bound indicate that this work was not, in fact, composed by Aeschylus. This argument is echoed by Taplin (1977, 1978, & 2007), Ruffell (2012), and Sommerstein (1996).

The seventeen fragments of Ezekiel’s Exagoge, a Hellenistic tragedy written by a Jewish author whose plot is lifted from the translated Book of Exodus, present several problems with respect to the play’s performance.

The representational strategies that dominate many of Euripides' dramas amplify aesthetic and affective intimacies and proximities at the edges of the human (especially skin/clothing, living/dead, human/object). These strategies also often foreground tragic embodiments as constellated and contiguous formations that Deleuze and Guattari might have recognized as "assemblages" – that is, as combinations, extensions, or layerings of bodies and other entities (Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987, cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1977; also Grosz 2008, Wohl 2005, Seeley 2012).

Minority, or ‘minoritarian’ according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a political action. It challenges power and domination; it resists the violent coercion of law and the predominant norms; it deterritorializes itself from majority. Minority does not refer to quantitative. It is a substantial position that lacks power; it looks for escape-lines (ligne de fuite) from institutions, political order and social structure. Minority is not a static position nor is it a quality or characteristic. It is a process of ever-changing identities, of potentiality, of becoming (devenir).

From Aristophanes’ avian protagonists in Birds to the werewolves of the Zeus Lykaios cult in Arcadia, the Greek imagination teems with animal transformations. While scholarship on animals in the ancient world has recently blossomed in what has been called ‘the animal turn,’ modern approaches to human-animal metamorphosis do not typically make it beyond the interpretive framework of analogy, metaphor, or mimesis.

This paper makes use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “line of flight,” primarily from A Thousand Plateaus, to examine De rerum natura 5.1297-1349, a passage in which Lucretius describes abused animals revolting against their masters on the battlefield. In the animal revolt, Lucretius describes a series of abuses against animals that culminates in humans turning animal bodies, through prosthesis, into war technologies.

Gilles Deleuze’s longstanding engagement with Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time as duration (e.g. Bergsonism, Difference and Repetition, Cinema I and II) is well-acknowledged. This paper evaluates the benefits of using Deleuze’s Bergsonian affiliations to explore Heraclitus’ own thinking on time, as well as its consequent effect upon Empedocles.