Chorality and Lyric Thought in Greek Tragedy

Abstract

This dissertation contends that it is productive to consider tragedy a complex lyric genre, with

the chorus serving as the primary vehicle of that lyricism. While recent scholarship on the

tragic choral odes has established their close interactions with extra-dramatic lyric genres and

Athenian song culture, the hermeneutic implications of tragic lyricism beyond the plays’

original performance contexts have thus far remained largely unexplored. Lyric has long been

recognized as a mode of expression with different aims and means from mimetic, diegetic

narratives, oriented less towards rational argumentation than towards aesthetic synchrony and

semiotic experimentation. The introduction draws from a wide range of sources (both ancient

and modern) to construct an apparatus for approaching the plays, defining a methodology

termed “choral reading.” This mode values both close philological attention to the plays’

texture and musicality and attention to the plenitude (or “chorus”) of artistic, philosophical

and theoretical attention the texts have accrued over their reception histories. Such “choral

reading” is pursued in three chapters, each devoted to a single play. The chorus of Sophocles’

Antigone posits a cosmic order in the Ode to Man that is merely hypothetical, one that, as the

play progresses, it continuously revises and refines with existential consequences for the

human and the humanist. In Euripides’ Bacchae, the multi-generic potentialities of the

dramatic form are exploited to infect the play with a hyperchorality that allows for the

enactment of multiple synchronic competing versions of the myth of the birth of Dionysus.

Attention to this mode of story-telling is illustrative for thinking about how victims of trauma

communicate the affect that accompanied a horrific event rather than a narrative of cause and effect. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the terms that constitute the play’s famous adage pathei

mathos are constructed and complicated via the chorus’s exploration of the experiential

quality of various temporal modes. The play employs tragedy’s formal capacities to

dramatize the shadowy space between suffering or witnessing a traumatic experience and the

ability to articulate the event and its significance, a pattern that is reflected in contemporary

psychoanalytic trauma theory.