CALL. 01.11.2015: Fragmented Women: the Female Characters of Fragmentary Greek Tragedy - Nottingham

FECHA LÍMITE/DEADLINE/SCADENZA: 01/11/2015

FECHA CONGRESO/CONGRESS DATE/DATA CONGRESSO: 08-09/07/2016

LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: The University of Nottingham (Nottingham, England)

ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Patrick Finglass (U. Nottingham) ; Lyndsay Coo (U. Bristol)

INFO: patrick.finglass@nottingham.ac.uk l.coo@bristol.ac.uk

CALL:

One of the most welcome recent developments in the study of Greek tragedy has been the editorial activity that has allowed us to appreciate those tragedies that have come down to us in fragmentary form. Yet the riches to be found in the fragments are not always fully exploited: monographs on tragedy often neglect this material or treat it as a kind of ‘bonus extra’, rather than attempting to integrate the fragments – as challenging as they may be to work with – into wider investigations. Despite the increasing accessibility of the fragmentary plays, their plots and characters have lacked critical attention, allowing arguments and approaches based largely or solely on the extant material to become entrenched.

In this conference, we propose to take a subject at the heart of modern interpretive work on Greek tragedy – the portrayal of female characters – and to approach it with a new focus on ‘the fragments’, always emphasising that this was not a category that would have made sense to the audiences which saw and appreciated these plays in antiquity. Figures from the extant plays, such as Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Euripides’ Medea have dominated our conception of tragic women for centuries, forming the basis of seminal work on the ancient representation of gender, sexuality, and the family. What would happen if we replaced these paradigmatic figures with characters from the fragments: Niobe, Procne, Praxithea, Antiope, and Ino, to name but a few? How might current approaches illuminate these texts, and, conversely, how might these characters offer fresh perspectives on familiar questions? By taking the vantage point of the playwrights’ entire oeuvres, we hope to provoke a fundamental reassessment of approaches to female characters in Greek tragedy.

We would welcome abstracts for papers to be presented at the conference in Nottingham in July next year. Please send a text of no more than 300 words as an email attachment to both the organisers below, no later than November 1st 2015.