ANTIGONE:  THE CULTURAL WORK OF TRAGEDY

Laura Leibman

10/13/04

 

Outline:

I. Introduction

            A. The City Festival of Dionysus

            B. The Problem of Women in Classical Athens

            C. Ways of Reading

 

II. The Cultural Work of Tragedy

            A. Anxiety and the Empire

            B. Anxiety and the City

            C. Transgression as Cure:  the Carnivalesque

            D. Two Alternate Understandings of Transgression:  Repression & Rebellion

           

III. The Cultural Work of Antigone

            A. The Sick City and the Dionysian Cure

•    Teiresias admonishes Creon  (ll. 1072-79, p. 199)

•    The Chorus invokes Dionysus ( ll. 1192-1225, pp. 204-05)

            B. Creon's Tyrannical Transgression

•    The "Hymn to Man" (ll. 404-11, p. 175)

•    Polyneices belongs to the underworld gods, not Creon (ll. 1139-44, p. 202)

            C. Antigone's Ambiguous Transgression

•    Women must be subservient--Ismene to Antigone (ll. 55-78, p. 163)

•    Women and Mourning--Antigone's motive as piety ( ll. 84-88, p. 164)

•    The Bride of Death as Pitiable (ll. 929-34, p. 195)

 

                       

Quotes:

1. Christian Meier (The Political Art of Greek Tragedy, 2) explains,

            Around the time at which the oldest extant tragedies were produced, the Attic citizenry, mainly men of little education or experience who had hitherto existed within the confines of a provincial horizon, gained wide dominions as a result of the Persian Wars, assuming virtual primacy in the Aegean.  Shortly afterwards they toppled the aristocratic Council of the Areopagus and adopted sole responsibility for Athens and its empire.  This demanded a long arm and considerable boldness in the making of policy and the conduct of war over a domain that stretched from the Black Sea to Egypt and was soon to take in the west of Greece.  As a result, undreamt-of fields of activity and expectation opened up, so that in every area things could be perceived, shaped and mastered anew, initiating a great torrent of change.

            How did the Athenians cope with this power?

 

2. The Carnivalesque as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin  (Rabelais and his World, 109):

Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque argues that festivals such as the City Dionysia "celebrate temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.  Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal.  It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete."

 

3. The Bride of Death (Redfield, "Notes on a Greek Wedding," 190)

the epitaph of Phrasicleia reads:

Phrasicleia's monument.  Always I'll be called virgin.

            Instead of marriage the gods gave me this name.

 

 

Terms:

Dionysus Eleuthereus, Eleutherai:  androgynous god of wine and excess

City Dionysia (or "Great Dionysia"):  yearly festival to the God Dionysus

Agoranomoi:  purification officials

Phallephoria: procession of the phallus

Maenads ("ranting women":  Dionysian attendants

Kore (literally "the maiden"):  female death monument

 

 

Timeline:

532   BCE       First tragedy competition

486                  First comedy competition

479                  Greek Victory Against Persia

477                  Delian League Formed

458                  Aeschylus' Oresteia

454                  Treasury of Delian League move to Athens

447                  Parthenon Begun;  Revolt & Subduing of Euboea

441?                Sophocles' Antigone

432                  Dorians assemble at Athens and decide on War Against Athens

 

 

Selected Bibliography & Suggested Readings

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1968.

Dihle, Albrecht. A History of Greek Literature.  London:  Routledge, 1991.

Goldhill, Simon, "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology." Nothing to Do with Dionysos?       ed. John Winkler & Froma Zeitlin.  Princeton, NJ:  Princeton UP, 1990.

Keuls, Eva. Reign of the Phallus.  Berkeley:  U of Calif. P, 1985.

Meier, Christian.  The Political Art of Greek Tragedy.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Redfield, James, "Notes on the Greek Wedding," Arethusa.  15 (1982):  181-201.

Zeitlin, Froma, "Cultic Models of the Female:  Rites of Dionysus and Demeter," Arethusa.        15 (1982):  129-58.