Organized by Melissa Mueller (University of Massachusetts) and Mario Telo (UCLA)
“All things are animate, albeit in different degrees.” – Spinoza (Ethics, pt. 2, prop. 13, schol. 72)
Past decades have seen increasing interest in space, stage business, and costuming in Greek theater. Props and other stage objects – the nonhuman intersecting with the human – constitute a privileged but underexplored site of Greek drama’s materiality. Recent trends in critical theory such as the so-called new materialism have complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an interest in their agency and vitality, shifting the emphasis from semiotics to sensuous force and psychosomatic impact. J. Bennett (Vibrant Matter, Durham NC 2010: 5) has argued for ascribing to objects “an active, earthy…capaciousness” that makes them able to “produce effects” and to “affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power.” Similarly, B. Brown (A Sense of Things, Chicago 2003) has viewed objects as vibrant presences materializing the emotional transactions between human subjects. Other scholars have highlighted objects’ ability to unite the theatrical past and present.
Meanwhile, the “affective turn” in critical theory – redefining emotion as a material phenomenon that passes from body to body and involves the whole sensory spectrum – has fostered new, theoretically grounded interest in the exchange of corporeal and mental energy between performers (humans and objects) and audience. A concern with drama’s affective force has made aesthetics, in its etymological meanings of perception, sensation and feeling, an important trend in the field of Renaissance theater. A recent reassessment of Greek literature in light of materialistic aesthetics (J. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, Cambridge 2010) provides an apt interpretive framework for examining how Attic tragedy and comedy dramatize the dynamics of affective transmission.
All together, these trends point toward a newly robust sense of the physicality of the theatrical medium. For our panel on the materialities of Greek drama, we invite speakers to reflect on objects, nonhuman agency, and affect in Greek theatrical practice. Topics for this panel may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How do Attic tragedy and comedy use objects to represent the diffusion of sensation and feeling?
- What role do taste, touch and smell play in these genres? How do these senses give affective depth to the visual and aural medium?
- Is the relationship between human and nonhuman configured differently, depending on genre?
- How do affective transactions reflect different constructions of the material connection between drama and its audience?
- In studying objects and affect, how can critics overcome the limitations of the textual medium?
Please send anonymous abstracts (of no more than one page in length) for a 20-minute paper as PDF attachments to the SCS office at scsmeetings@sas.upenn.edu by March 2, 2015. Please mention the title of the panel in your email. Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously.