Thinking with Tragic Chorality

This book argues that in the Greek tragedy of the fifth century BCE, alongside every tragic plot there lies an often-overlooked "choral project," evident via close attention to the musical and imagistic threads that tie together choral odes and other lyric passages. This lyricism, characterized by aesthetic synchrony and semiotic experimentation, works in productive dialectical tension with the presentation of the action, and contributes significantly to a given play's meaning. Such tension is achieved in part via the chorus's labile identity: simultaneously singular and plural, an interested character conditioned by their gender, class, and citizenship status, and a detached commentator divorced from material concerns, they subvert the ideal of the individual hero to access myriad perspectives. A methodological chapter explores how the tragic chorus challenges notions of individual subjectivity (prefiguring recent developments in posthumanism), how choral expression can manipulate time and space to open opportunities for ruminations that transcend the exigencies of plot, and how the chorus channels the affective energies that arise between characters to generate new kinds of knowledge. Three case study chapters demonstrate the ways that tragic choral expression and tragic chorality more broadly seem to anticipate various developments in contemporary critical theory: the chorality of Euripides' Bacchae is read through queer time and the discourse of wildness (alongside Teat(r)o Oficina's Brazilian production Bacantes), of Aeschylus' Agamemnon through postcolonial trauma theory (alongside Yaël Farber's South African production Molora), and of Sophocles' Antigone through exemplarity and ecocriticism (alongside Anne Carson's artist's book translation Antigonick). In each case, the book considers the history of philological and literary critical interpretations of the tragedies in tandem with their respective creative reception histories, arguing that such work offers a situated analysis that can bring to the surface dynamics easily overlooked in more traditional hermeneutic modes.