SCS-14: Tragedy and Reception

The analysis of modern dance is an exciting and growing new field in classical reception studies. This paper analyzes the reception of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra (1958). Graham’s engagement with Greek tragedy has attracted much attention in recent years (Papathanasopoulou 2023 and 2021; Ancona 2020; Bannerman 2010; Yaari 2003). However, Clytemnestra has not been examined in close comparison to the ancient sources that formed the inspiration for her work.

Forgetting as a form of repressive erasure has been forced upon human beings against their interests and their will throughout history (Connerton, 2011). This paper examines the relationship between forgetting and silence in the face of authority through Sophocles' Antigone. In this paper, I claim that in Antigone, repressive erasure carries a paradoxical need for a constant reminder and it creates silence based on fear rather than a natural forgetting.

Two conceptual territories bracket Europe’s imaginary geography: Greco-Roman Antiquity and the modern Balkans. According to Artemis Leontis, an “abstract principle of territorial identification” ties the political and cultural life of both modern Hellas and Western Europe to ancient Greek civilization. Rome has similarly been at the center of “a long and ongoing tradition of appropriating classical history and literature” to foster imperialist “narrative[s] of the exceptional progress” (Barnard). In comparison, the space of the Balkans seems peripheral to the project of European identity.

This paper explores how Kaite O’Reilly’s play peeling, a contemporary reimagining of Euipides’ Trojan Women originally produced in 2002, reads Euripides’ text through the lens of disability culture to examine the relationship between disability and trauma, the gender politics of disability, disabled visibility, histories of eugenics, and disabled futurity.