Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy

Do we take pleasure in reading ancient Greek tragedy despite the unsettling content or because of it? Does a safe aesthetic distance protect us from tragic suffering, or does the proximity to death tap into something more primal? Aristotle proposed catharsis, an emotional cleansing--or, in later interpretations, a sense of equilibrium--as tragedy's outcome, and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, grand theorists of the forces of anti-mastery in human and nonhuman existence, surprisingly agreed. Notwithstanding this deferral to Aristotle, their theorizations of the death drive--together with Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive as a place of conservation that inevitably fails--provide the groundwork for a radically new way of understanding tragic aesthetics.

With bold readings of thirteen plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, including the Oedipus cycle, the Oresteia, Medea, and Bacchae; an eclectic synthesis of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, Deleuze, and other critical theorists; and an engagement with art, architecture, and film, Mario Telò's Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy locates Greek tragedy's aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. In so doing, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.


Author: Mario Telò
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 11/16/2020
Pages: 322
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9780814214558
ISBN10: 081421455X
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Ancient and Classical
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Drama | Ancient & Classical

About the Author
Mario Telò is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon.

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