Aristophanes & the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the CanonThe Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals? Telò boldly traces Aristophanes’s rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close readings of his revised Clouds and other works, such as Wasps, uncover references to the earlier Clouds, presented by Aristophanes as his failed attempt to heal the audience, who are reflected in the plays as a kind of dysfunctional father. In this proto-canonical narrative of failure, grounded in the distinctive feelings of different comic modes, Aristophanic comedy becomes cast as a prestigious object, a soft, protective cloak meant to shield viewers from the debilitating effects of competitors’ comedies and restore a sense of paternal responsibility and authority. Associations between afflicted fathers and healing sons, between audience and poet, are shown to be at the center of the discourse that has shaped Aristophanes’s canonical dominance ever since. |
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Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon Mario Telò Limited preview - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Aeschylean Aeschylus Aeschylus's Aesop aesthetic affect Agamemnon agōn ancient anger Aristophanes Aristophanic comedy assimilation Athenian audience's Bakola Bdelycleon Bellerophon Biles canonical chlaina Chorus Chorus's chthonic Cleon cloak Clytemnestra comedian comic audience comic mode comic poet connection contest Cratinean comedy Cratinus Cratinus's daemonic dancing Demos desis discourse dramatic edited Electra emotional Erinyes Eupolis Eupolis's Euripidean Euripides fable failure father fevers genre Greek hamartia Heraclean Heracles himation Hippolytus iambic imagery infantile intertextual intratextual Knights law court lusis Lysistratus madness manic monody Myrtia narrative Niobe Old Comedy old man's onstage parabasis parabatic paratragic paternal performance Phaedra Phaedra's Pheidippides Philocleon's phortikē kōmōidia play play's plot poetic prologue proto-canonical Pytine ragged reading Revermann rivals Rosen Ruffell satiric scene second Clouds semnotēs Socrates Sommerstein sōphrosunē spectators Strepsiades suffocation suggests symbolic sympotic Telò theatrical therapeutic Thinkery Thuphrastus tion tophanes tragedians tragedy tragic tribōn tropoi verb Wasps Xanthias Xanthias's δὲ καὶ τὸν Φι