Tragic Bodies

"This book argues for a new way of reading tragedy that attends to how bodies on the ancient Athenian stage pivot between subject and object, human and inhuman, and so serve as vehicles for confronting the edges of the human -for thinking beyond or without or instead of it. At the same time, it explores the ways in which Greek tragedy pulls up close to human bodies, examining their physical edges, their surfaces and parts, their coverings or nakedness, and their postures. Drawing on and leading forward the latest interplays of posthumanism and materialism in their relation to classical literature, Nancy Worman shows how enactment such as this may seem to emphasize the 'human' body, but in effect does something quite different. Instead of expressing something innately human in this sense, the body is instead treated as a thing that has the status and implications of other objects, such as a sieve, an urn, a toy for a dog. Tragic Bodies urges attention to key scenes in Greek tragedy that foreground such bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing, where signs with weighty symbolic resonance distil out on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and imbrication, as well as for closeness, contact, and sensory dynamics. This way of reading the dramatic script pursues the felt knowledge at the body's edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration attuned to how bodies register at tragedy's unique intersections; that is, at points where directive, enacted, and figurative language points up visual, tactile, and aural details"--