Euripides and the Politics of Form

219 Pages·2015·1.17 MB·English

by  Victoria Wohl

Euripides and the Politics of Form
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Martin Classical Lectures
The Martin Classical Lectures are delivered annually at Oberlin College through
a foundation established by his many friends in honor of Charles Beebe Martin,
for forty- five years a teacher of classical literature and classical art at Oberlin.
John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the
Odyssey
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hel-
lenistic Ethics
Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of
Popular Rule
Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul
Celan)
Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy
Mark W. Edwards, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and
Latin Poetry
Michael C. J. Putnam, Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace
Julia Haig Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in
Transmission and Reception
Kenneth J. Reckford, Recognizing Persius
Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue,
and the Invention of Greek Prose
Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity
Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fic-
tion, and the Proclamation of Modernity
Victoria Wohl, Euripides and the Politics of Form
Euripides and the Politics of Form
•
Victoria Wohl
Princeton University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wohl, Victoria, 1966– author.
Euripides and the politics of form / Victoria Wohl.
pages cm—(Martin classical lectures)
ISBN 978-0-691-16650-6 (alk. paper)
1. Euripides—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series:
Martin classical lectures.
PA3978.W64 2015
882ʹ.01–dc23 2014036247
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Baskerville 10 Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For MG
•

C
ontents
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Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction. The Politics of Form 1
Chapter 1. Dramatic Means and Ideological Ends 19
Chapter 2. Beautiful Tears 39
Chapter 3. Recognition and Realism 63
Chapter 4. The Politics of Political Allegory 89
Chapter 5. Broken Plays for a Broken World 110
Conclusion. Content of the Form 132
Notes 143
Bibliography 171
Index 193

P
refaCe
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Let me begin by explaining my title. First, Euripides. This is not really
a book about Euripides. It doesn’t treat all his plays or offer a synthetic
analysis of their characteristic features; nor does it provide exhaustive
readings of the plays it does treat. I do aim to shed light on Euripidean
drama, to better understand what it is doing and how. But the book’s
raison d’être, and my defense for adding to the enormous bibliography
on the author, lies in the second half of the title. Euripides is offered as
an illustration—not the only possible one, though not, of course, cho-
sen completely at random—of an argument about the relation between
politics and literary form.
My definition of politics is both narrow and broad. It encompasses,
on the one hand, the formal institutions and political practices, the
class relations and power struggles, the communal decisions and ac-
tions of the fifth- century Athenian democracy; and on the other hand,
the ideological beliefs (collective and individual), the attitudes and at-
tachments, the “structures of feeling” (in Raymond Williams’s phrase)
that subtend the institutional structures of the polis. Drama operates
more directly within the latter, the psychic and affective domain of ide-
ology, but in doing so (as I hope to show) it can intervene actively in
the former. Thus, while my title is meant as an allusion to Fredric Jame-
son’s “ideology of form,” and a recognition of my methodological debt
to his work, I chose the term “politics” in order to highlight the dimen-
sion of the polis and to insist upon the possibility of drama’s real and
material impact on the collective life of its citizens.1
By “form” I mean nothing particularly esoteric. Following Aristotle,
I take the defining formal feature of drama to be its plot structure, the
muthos. If tragedy is, as Aristotle defines it, a mimēsis of a praxis, an imi-
tation of an action, the emplotment of that action is “dramatic sub-
stance . . . in its formal dimension.”2 The structure of the plot—its inter-
nal organization and the ligatures between its parts, its tempo and