Metapoetry in Euripides

389 Pages·2013·2.83 MB·English

by  Isabelle Torrance

Title Pages
Metapoetry in Euripides
Isabelle Torrance
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Metapoetry in Euripides
(p.ii) (p.iii) Metapoetry in Euripides
(p.iv)
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© Isabelle Torrance 2013
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Title Pages
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Dedication
Metapoetry in Euripides
Isabelle Torrance
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) Carissimis Parentibus
A. Andrew Torrance
et
Marie‐Christiane Torrance
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Preface
Metapoetry in Euripides
Isabelle Torrance
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.001.0001
(p.vi) (p.vii) Preface
The ideas in this book have been evolving since I submitted my Ph.D. thesis on
Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians at Trinity College Dublin in 2004.
Although this book bears no obvious relation to my doctoral thesis, the Iphigenia
among the Taurians features prominently throughout in discussions of
intertexuality, ekphrasis, self‐conscious fiction, and the elusive Euripidean ‘tone’.
I bear a debt of gratitude especially to my doctoral supervisor Judith Mossman,
but also to my examiners John Dillon and Pat Easterling, for much
encouragement at an early formative stage.
This book was essentially written during two periods of leave. The University of
Notre Dame granted me one semester of supported leave (in 2009–10), and
allowed me to take a further semester of leave in 2011 to complete the project.
Notre Dame's Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts provided travel
expenses to enable the presentation of parts of my work at the University of
Nottingham (in 2007) and at the Classical Association conference in Glasgow (in
2009), covered the costs of commissioning the illustrations and of the indexing,
awarded me two summer stipends in 2009 and in 2011 to pursue this project,
and funded two visits (in February and March 2010) by Edith Hall, with whom I
discussed my work and whose advice helped me to focus. I also received a
summer stipend in 2010 under the Notre Dame faculty scholarship award
scheme, and a travel and research award from the Nanovic Institute for
European Studies, which covered expenses during my time as a Visiting
Research Fellow at the University of Exeter in autumn 2009. It is a great
pleasure to acknowledge the support of Notre Dame as an institution, and of my
Notre Dame colleagues in Classics, especially the late Sabine MacCormack, who
was as generous as she was inspiring, and my chair Liz Mazurek, who read a
draft of Chapter 4 and made several helpful suggestions.
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Preface
Several other colleagues have helped me see this project through to its fruition.
In Exeter my dear friend Karen Ní Mheallaigh was a most gracious host, and has
been a beacon in bad times and in good, always ready to read a draft or discuss
anything ‘meta’. I also benefited greatly from conversations with Matthew
Wright in Exeter, and from his (no longer anonymous) comments for OUP on the
first three (p.viii) chapters of this book. James Morwood, similarly, made many
perspicacious remarks on the same chapters in his capacity as (now unmasked)
OUP reader. I am grateful also to Niall Slater for feedback on a draft of Chapter
2, and for much general encouragement. Overall, however, special mention must
be given to Alan Sommerstein, who has read each of the five chapters in this
book in some form or another, always with astonishing speed and insight. His
detailed comments have saved me from more than a few infelicities and errors
and have led to many improvements. Parts of Chapter 1 are revised from an
article which first appeared in the American Journal of Philology 132.2 (2011)
177‐204 (Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press), reprinted with
permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 3 is a newly updated
version of an article published in the Cambridge Classical Journal (2010) 213–58,
here reprinted in revised form with the kind permission of the Cambridge
Philological Society. Hilary O'Shea, Taryn Campbell, Heather Watson, Cathryn
Steele, Kizzy Taylor‐Richelieu, and the entire team at OUP have been a pleasure
to work with, and extremely efficient. Needless to say, any remaining
inadequacies are due to my own shortcomings or obstinacy.
Above all else, the support of my family has meant the most. My husband Aaron
Ryan has brought me more happiness than I could say I deserve in the years of
researching and writing this book. My brother‐in‐law, Michael Ryan, brought his
illustrations to life for the cover of the book, and I have deeply appreciated
Michael's expert support, and the moral support of all my Tipperary in‐laws,
John Paul, Tammy, Pa Joe, and especially Helen, whose kindness and wisdom
defy every mother‐in‐law stereotype. My own brothers Marc and Alexis Torrance
have always been available to lend an ear or to give emergency technical
support, delivered with good humour. The last word goes to my parents, Andrew
and Marie‐Christiane Torrance, who have been there since the beginning. I
dedicate this book to them, a small token of thanks for everything they have
given me.
Isabelle Torrance
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List of Illustrations
Metapoetry in Euripides
Isabelle Torrance
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.001.0001
(p.xi) List of Illustrations
All © Aaron Ryan
1 The shield of Aeschylus' Polynices 107
2 The shield of Aeschylus' Eteoclus 109
3 The shield of Aeschylus' Capaneus 111
4 The shield of Aeschylus' Hippomedon 112
5 The shield of Euripides' Parthenopaeus 115
6 The shield of Aeschylus' Parthenopaeus 116
7 The shield of Euripides' Hippomedon 117
8 The shield of Aeschylus' Tydeus 119
9 The shield of Euripides' Tydeus 120
10 The shield of Euripides' Polynices 122
11 The shield of Euripides' Capaneus 126
12 The shield of Euripides' Adrastus 128
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Abbreviations
Metapoetry in Euripides
Isabelle Torrance
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.001.0001
(p.xii) (p.xiii) Abbreviations
Abbreviations listed here are restricted to those which do not appear (or are
referred to differently) in LSJ (Liddel–Scott‐Jones, Greek–English Lexicon
(Oxford, 1996) ) or in the OCD (Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 2003) ). In
some cases, abbreviations of ancient authors' names and text titles are less
truncated than in the aforementioned works and the authors and works referred
to should be obvious. Overall, English titles of texts are preferred to
transliterated Greek titles (or Latin titles), so that I refer to Libation Bearers
(LB), for example, rather than Choephoroi, though in the case of fragmentary
texts, where titles are not proper names, both English and Greek titles are given,
at least in the first instance and in the Index. Unless otherwise stated, all
fragment numbers for Greek tragedy are those listed in Tragicorum Graecorum
Fragmenta (TGrF), and fragment numbers for Greek comedy are taken from
Poetae Comici Graeci (PCG).
Act. Class.
Acta Classica
BMCR
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
CA
Classical Antiquity
CCJ
Cambridge Classical Journal
CP
Classical Philology
CSCA
California Studies in Classical Antiquity
CW
Classical World
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Abbreviations
HSCP
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
LICS
Leeds International Classical Studies
PEG
Poetae Epici Graeci
QUCC
Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica
REG
Revue des Études Grecques
RhM
Rheinisches Museum für Philologie
WS
Wiener Studien
YCS
Yale Classical Studies
(p.xiv)
Page 2 of 2
Introduction
Metapoetry in Euripides
Isabelle Torrance
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.001.0001
Introduction
Isabelle Torrance
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657834.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
The Introduction provides an explanation of the concept of metapoetry applied
in this book, and considers the associated terminology of intertextuality,
metatheatricality, metafiction, metamythology, and Bloom’s anxiety of influence
model, also discussing some important scholarship in these areas. It provides an
outline of the book’s chapters and arguments, and addresses the issue of a
reading public in the fifth century bc.
Keywords:   metapoetry, intertextuality, metatheatricality, metafiction, metamythology, anxiety of
influence, reading public
With due respect to Socrates, poets are generally very well aware of what
they are doing: aware not only of their craft in general, of the function of
poetry, of the relationship between poet and audience and so on, but also
of the individual way in which they operate, and of the impact they want to
have.
J. M. Bremer (1993) 125
This book revisits some old chestnuts of Euripidean scholarship and proposes a
new framework for understanding his oeuvre as a whole. It has always been
clear, from the fifth century BC onwards, that Euripides is different from the
other great fifth‐century tragic poets, his predecessor Aeschylus and his older
contemporary Sophocles. Euripides was mercilessly parodied by his younger
contemporary, the comic poet Aristophanes, in a way the other two dramatists
are not. Why is Euripides such a significant source of comic material? What is so
different about him? Scholars have offered various answers: he is controversial,
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Introduction
radical, a rationalist who subverted (even abased) the genre of tragedy.1 This
book suggests a different answer. I argue that Euripidean distinctiveness is
entirely linked to the highly developed metapoetic strategies of his dramas.
These strategies are, in some cases, the focus of Aristophanic parodies of
Euripidean style, such as the characterization of Euripidean drama as
‘novel’ (kainos). Such techniques may also be common across the genres of
tragedy, satyr‐drama, and comedy, appearing only implicitly in tragedy, which
cannot withstand explicit self‐referentiality in the same manner as can satyr‐
drama and comedy. Several scholars, (p.2) most notably Froma Zeitlin and the
late Charles Segal, have observed metapoetic elements in specific Euripidean
tragedies,2 but there exists no detailed study of this aspect of Euripidean drama,
nor has the connection between Euripidean metapoetics and Euripidean
distinctiveness been studied in sufficient depth. This book aims to go some way
towards filling that gap.
Zeitlin's concept of a palimpsestic text in her brilliant analysis of Euripides'
Orestes and Segal's exposition of metatragedy in the Bacchae have both had a
formative influence on my ideas. Zeitlin's notion of a palimpsest anticipated (by
two years) Gérard Genette's influential Palimpsests, a narratological study of the
relationship between literary texts in which he developed five categories of
‘transtextuality’ and coined the terminology of the hypotext which lurks beneath
the surface of the hypertext.3 An emphasis on authorial intention is also central
to Genette's theory. In this sense, Genette's theory differs from the linguistic
theories of Saussure, who influenced poststructuralist theorists Kristeva and
Bakhtin (discussed below). For Saussure, langue (rendered ‘system’ in English)
is more important than parole (‘work’), so signification and function are
privileged at the expense of intention.4 Segal's approach in discussing the
Bacchae had more to do with recognizing the artifice of the tragic theatre than
with palimpsestic layers of textual allusion, as did Helene Foley's analysis of the
mask of Dionysus.5 This focus on metatheatre in the Bacchae has been followed
by Dobrov.6 With the god of theatre as a leading character in the drama, and
Pentheus' transvestism, Euripides' Bacchae is a prime case study for
metatheatricality, while the loss of Aeschylus' Edonians and Bassarids, on which
Bacchae was most likely modelled in several ways, means that it is difficult to
recover the palimpsestic nature of that text.
Thomas Rosenmeyer has recently challenged and criticized the ‘overload’ of
identifications of metatheatre in Greek drama and beyond, where an all‐
pervasive presence of metatheatricality seems to become the overriding factor in
a dramatic experience.7 I share some of Rosenmeyer's concerns in this area (see
Ch. 5, pp. 269–71), and agree with his assessment that metatheatrical or
metafictional references (p.3) represent select moments during a performance
rather than an overarching framework.8 Nevertheless, the terminology of
metatheatricality and metafiction remains useful for describing dramatic
moments or scenes that trigger audience reflection on the theatricality of a
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