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Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.
This accessible introduction to the work of one of the world's greatest comic writers tackles key questions posed by Aristophanes' plays, such as staging, humour, songs, obscene language, politics and the modern translation and performance of Aristophanic comedy. The book opens up exciting and contentious areas of Aristophanic scholarship in a way that is engaging and readily comprehensible to a non-specialist audience, never losing sight of the fact that Aristophanes' plays are vibrant literary texts, designed primarily to appeal to a classical Athenian audience as pieces of living drama. Key to the book's appeal is that James Robson conceives of the plays as dynamic texts, containing a treasure trove of information not only about how they might have been performed and received in classical Athens, but also how they might be read and understood today. Most importantly, readers are given the tools and information to make their own minds up about the debates that still rage about Aristophanic comedy in the modern world.
All Greek in the text is translated; the versions offered seek to convey the distinctive character of the original."--BOOK JACKET.
This volume sets out to discuss a crucial question for ancient comedy – what makes Aristophanes funny? Too often Aristophanes' humour is taken for granted as merely a tool for the delivery of political and social commentary. But Greek Old Comedy was above all else designed to amuse people, to win the dramatic competition by making the audience laugh the hardest. Any discussion of Aristophanes therefore needs to take into account the ways in which his humour actually works. This question is addressed in two ways. The first half of the volume offers an in-depth discussion of humour theory – a field heretofore largely overlooked by classicists and Aristophanists – examining various theoretical models within the specific context of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays. In the second half, contributors explore Aristophanic humour more practically, examining how specific linguistic techniques and performative choices affect the reception of humour, and exploring the range of subjects Aristophanes tackles as vectors for his comedy. A focus on performance shapes the narrative, since humour lives or dies on the stage – it is never wholly comprehensible on the page alone.
This richly illustrated book is a comprehensive study of visual humour in ancient Greece, emphasising works created in Athens and Boeotia.
The contributions to this volume illustrate how the linguistic study of Greek comedy can deepen our knowledge of the intricate connections between the dramatic texts and their literary and socio-cultural environment. Topics discussed include the relationship of comedy and iambus, the world of Doric comedy in Sicily, figures of speech and obscene vocabulary in Aristophanes, comic elements in tragedy, language and cultural identity in fifth-century Athens, linguistic characterizationin Middle Comedy, the textual transmission of New Comedy, and the interaction of language and dramatic technique in Menander. Research in these topics and in related areas is reviewed in an extensive bibliographical essay.While the main focus is on comedy, the diversity of the approaches adopted (including narratology, pragmatics, lexicology, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and textual criticism) ensures that much of the work applies to different genres and is relevant also to linguists and literary scholars.
A detailed study of the self-conscious narrative devices within Euripidean drama and how these are interwoven with issues of thematic importance, social, theological, or political. Torrance argues that Euripides employed a complex system of metapoetic strategies in order to draw the audience's attention to the novelty of his compositions.
Greek comedy flourished in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, both in and beyond Athens. Aristophanes and Menander are the best-known writers whose work is in part extant, but many other dramatists are known from surviving fragments of their plays. This sophisticated but accessible introduction explores the genre as a whole, integrating literary questions (such as characterisation, dramatic technique or diction) with contextual ones (for example audience response, festival context, interface with ritual or political frames). In addition, it also discusses relevant historical issues (political, socio-economic and legal) as well as the artistic and archaeological evidence. The result provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature which will be of help to students at all levels and from a variety of disciplines but will also provide stimulus for further research.
Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor develops an inclusive theory that integrates psychological, aesthetic, and ethical issues relating to humor Offers an enlightening and accessible foray into the serious business of humor Reveals how standard theories of humor fail to explain its true nature and actually support traditional prejudices against humor as being antisocial, irrational, and foolish Argues that humor’s benefits overlap significantly with those of philosophy Includes a foreword by Robert Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker