Francis M Dunn
Biographic Data
| ID | 5626179 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francis M Dunn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francis M |
| FAMILY NAME | Dunn |
| SIGNATURE | DUNN F M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 27 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Narrative Bonds in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
The telling of stories can generate powerful affective bonds between individuals. This is especially evident in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, where stories arouse feelings and attachments that lead characters to reverse course at three crucial moments in the drama
Sophocles
Reviewed by: Sophocles: Oedipus the King ed. by P. J. Finglass Francis Dunn P. J. Finglass (ed.). Sophocles: Oedipus the King. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 708. $170.00. ISBN 978-1-108-41951-2. Patrick Finglass, who has previously edited Sophocles’ Electra and Ajax in this series, now gives us an excellent edition of Oedipus the King. An introduction discusses briefly the pla…
The Fifth Century and After
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The Prosopon Fallacy or, Apollo in Sophocles’ Electra
Late Sophocles
Reviewed by: Late Sophocles: The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus by Thomas Van Nortwick Francis Dunn Thomas Van Nortwick. Late Sophocles: The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 148. $65.00. ISBN 978–0-472–11956–1. Near the end of his life Sophocles, who already had sons by two different wives, took up with a courtesan named Arch…
Dynamic Allusion in Sophocles
Sophocles and the Narratology of Drama
Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece
Francis M. Dunn's Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece examines the widespread social and cultural disorientation experienced by Athenians in a period that witnessed the revolution of 411 B.C.E. and the military misadventures in 413 and 404---a disturbance as powerful as that described in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. The late fifth century was a time of vast cultural and intellectual change, ultimately leading to a shift away from Athenian…
Trope and Setting in Sophocles’ Electra
Orestes and the Urn (Sophocles, Electra 54-55)
Orestes and Tragicomedy
The baffling Helen generates confusions about the nature of the drama just as it generates confusion about the identity of Helen; the radically uncertain course of events threatens to reduce the action to an unintelligible chaos, while the happy end pro vides the reassuring frame of romance. In the predictable plots that Shaw reviles, the two impulses reinforce one another: the damsel must first be threatened with demons and dangers in order to j…
Machine
The credits begin to roll, the curtain falls, or the curl of a koronis adorns the page, and we are reassured that the performance has ended or that the book is finished. But is such a gesture necessary? Or is a mere gesture sufficient? If the drama is complete, then surely the gesture is an empty one: formal but redundant confirmation that the action has been wrapped up in a satisfactory manner. However, if the action remains open, then the gestu…
Repetition
If Henry James suggests that every novel should try to fashion a finite whole from the seamless web of human relations, Gerhart Hauptmann argues instead that every performance, despite its finite scope, should try to repeat the endless struggle of life. Because this is impossible, because drama’s subject knows no beginning or end, every play has something conventional or pedantic about its conclusion. Obviously, this is not quite true. First, not…
Dedication
Vestige
The most obvious closing gestures in Euripi dean drama are the choral exit and the deus ex machine. They are also the most controversial: choral exits are frequently considered spurious, while the spectacular deus invites sharply conflicting interpretations. These visible and problematic gestures, as I have argued, are specifically formal answers to the basic questions of dramatic closure: how to end the performance and how to conclude the action…
Curtain
Perhaps because they are so uncertain and so provisional, endings seem anxiously to demand validation; they want gestures to confirm that this is the proper place to end. There are, as we shall see, many different ways of lending formal or cultural authority to the ending, but the simplest and most familiar is confirmation that the performance is over. As a movie comes to an end, the strings strike up their coda, the credits begin to roll, and fi…
Erasure
My third trope-and the phenomenon it intends to describe-is more subtle. In Hippolytus, the gestures of closure are doubled, repeated both at the beginning and at the end of the work; in Trojan Women, they are moved, displaced from the end of the work to its beginning; and in Heracles these gestures are uncertain, seeming to appear-and seeming not to appear-where we expect them. The trope, like erasure itself, is a complex one: not a simple absen…
Postscript
Greek tragedy, unlike many other forms of drama, presumes a historical and cultural continuum that embraces both the events enacted onstage and the viewers themselves, and the Euripidean aition overtly complicates this thread. Yet the drama implies (or seems to imply) another more essential continuum: the thread of events that constitute the plot. And insofar as the drama raises questions about the end of this thread, it brings us back to the iss…
Helen and Romance
In the epigraph to this chapter, Shaw registers annoyance at those who assume Eliza will marry Higgins for two reasons. The first is the ending itself: if we consider Eliza’s self-interest and her instincts (Shaw assures us), and if we ask what she might do when faced with the choice between a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers and a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers, “there can be no doubt about the answer.” Given a woman like Eliza who know…
Phoenician Women and Narrative
Around the time of the production of Orestes, 1 Euripides produced another play that was just as experimental and would become just as popular: Phoenician Women and Orestes were the most commonly read and quoted classical works apart from Homer throughout antiquity, and together with Hecuba came to form the “Byzantine triad” of select plays. It is an interesting item in the history of reception that ancient audiences and readers showed much great…
Reversal
In Hippolytus, the unusual symmetry of closing gestures in prologue and epilogue is more than a curious detail. The repetition that seems to enhance the play’s formal perfection succeeds instead in paralyzing the plot; an exceptional play that is often judged Euripides’ best makes drama impossible. So it is with a certain sense of critical symmetry that I turn to a play that has often been considered Euripides’ worst and that deploys its closing …
Sophocles’ „Electra“ in Performance
Tragedy’s End
Francis Dunn explores the novel gestures that close the dramas of Euripides, showing how these deny access to an authoritative reading of the plays, reinforce innovations in plot and structure, and open up tragedy to comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. The author provides the first large-scale study of closure in classical literature, and includes readings of plot, ending, and generic innovation in Hyppolytus, Trojan women, Hercules, and the …
Hunayn Ibn Ishaq On Tragedy and Comedy
Beginnings in Classical Literature
Tragedy’s End
Francis Dunn explores the novel gestures that close the dramas of Euripides, showing how these deny access to an authoritative reading of the plays, reinforce innovations in plot and structure, and open up tragedy to comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. The author provides the first large-scale study of closure in classical literature, and includes readings of plot, ending, and generic innovation in Hyppolytus, Trojan women, Hercules, and the …
From the archives
Beginnings in Classical Literature
From the archives
The Battle of the Sexes in Euripides' Ion
Euripides' Ion has suffered from the attempt to find in the play an overriding message or moral. Verrall and his successors saw the Ion as an attack against Apollo and organized religion; Wassermann and Burnett argue that it defends orthodox piety; Grégoire and Loraux view it as a hymn or lament on Athenian national pride; and Knox and Gellie respond that the Ion is pure comedy with no deeper meaning. There is of course some truth to each of thes…
Introduction
“Well, now I'll turn to his prologues,” Euripides exclaims, “and the first part of the tragedy will be the very first thing of this clever man's that I put to the rack.” The earliest surviving example of literary criticism in antiquity is the riotous parody in Aristophanes' Frogs , where Euripides subjects the beginning of Aeschylus' Choephori to hair-splitting sophistic torture, and Aeschylus responds with verbal slap-stick, pummeling his oppone…
Beginnings in Classical Literature
The ways in which literary works begin have proved fascinating to readers and critics at least since Aristophanes. This collection of essays gives life to a topic of perennial interest by presenting a variety of original readings in nearly all the major genres of Greek and Latin literature. The subjects of these essays range from narrative voices in the opening of the Odyssey to ideological reasons for Tacitus' choice of a beginning in the Histor…
Beginnings in Classical Literature
Hunayn Ibn Ishaq On Tragedy and Comedy
Orestes and Tragicomedy
The baffling Helen generates confusions about the nature of the drama just as it generates confusion about the identity of Helen; the radically uncertain course of events threatens to reduce the action to an unintelligible chaos, while the happy end pro vides the reassuring frame of romance. In the predictable plots that Shaw reviles, the two impulses reinforce one another: the damsel must first be threatened with demons and dangers in order to j…
Machine
The credits begin to roll, the curtain falls, or the curl of a koronis adorns the page, and we are reassured that the performance has ended or that the book is finished. But is such a gesture necessary? Or is a mere gesture sufficient? If the drama is complete, then surely the gesture is an empty one: formal but redundant confirmation that the action has been wrapped up in a satisfactory manner. However, if the action remains open, then the gestu…
Repetition
If Henry James suggests that every novel should try to fashion a finite whole from the seamless web of human relations, Gerhart Hauptmann argues instead that every performance, despite its finite scope, should try to repeat the endless struggle of life. Because this is impossible, because drama’s subject knows no beginning or end, every play has something conventional or pedantic about its conclusion. Obviously, this is not quite true. First, not…
Dedication
Vestige
The most obvious closing gestures in Euripi dean drama are the choral exit and the deus ex machine. They are also the most controversial: choral exits are frequently considered spurious, while the spectacular deus invites sharply conflicting interpretations. These visible and problematic gestures, as I have argued, are specifically formal answers to the basic questions of dramatic closure: how to end the performance and how to conclude the action…
Curtain
Perhaps because they are so uncertain and so provisional, endings seem anxiously to demand validation; they want gestures to confirm that this is the proper place to end. There are, as we shall see, many different ways of lending formal or cultural authority to the ending, but the simplest and most familiar is confirmation that the performance is over. As a movie comes to an end, the strings strike up their coda, the credits begin to roll, and fi…
Erasure
My third trope-and the phenomenon it intends to describe-is more subtle. In Hippolytus, the gestures of closure are doubled, repeated both at the beginning and at the end of the work; in Trojan Women, they are moved, displaced from the end of the work to its beginning; and in Heracles these gestures are uncertain, seeming to appear-and seeming not to appear-where we expect them. The trope, like erasure itself, is a complex one: not a simple absen…
Postscript
Greek tragedy, unlike many other forms of drama, presumes a historical and cultural continuum that embraces both the events enacted onstage and the viewers themselves, and the Euripidean aition overtly complicates this thread. Yet the drama implies (or seems to imply) another more essential continuum: the thread of events that constitute the plot. And insofar as the drama raises questions about the end of this thread, it brings us back to the iss…
Helen and Romance
In the epigraph to this chapter, Shaw registers annoyance at those who assume Eliza will marry Higgins for two reasons. The first is the ending itself: if we consider Eliza’s self-interest and her instincts (Shaw assures us), and if we ask what she might do when faced with the choice between a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers and a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers, “there can be no doubt about the answer.” Given a woman like Eliza who know…
Phoenician Women and Narrative
Around the time of the production of Orestes, 1 Euripides produced another play that was just as experimental and would become just as popular: Phoenician Women and Orestes were the most commonly read and quoted classical works apart from Homer throughout antiquity, and together with Hecuba came to form the “Byzantine triad” of select plays. It is an interesting item in the history of reception that ancient audiences and readers showed much great…
Reversal
In Hippolytus, the unusual symmetry of closing gestures in prologue and epilogue is more than a curious detail. The repetition that seems to enhance the play’s formal perfection succeeds instead in paralyzing the plot; an exceptional play that is often judged Euripides’ best makes drama impossible. So it is with a certain sense of critical symmetry that I turn to a play that has often been considered Euripides’ worst and that deploys its closing …
Sophocles’ „Electra“ in Performance
Tragedy’s End
Francis Dunn explores the novel gestures that close the dramas of Euripides, showing how these deny access to an authoritative reading of the plays, reinforce innovations in plot and structure, and open up tragedy to comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. The author provides the first large-scale study of closure in classical literature, and includes readings of plot, ending, and generic innovation in Hyppolytus, Trojan women, Hercules, and the …
Orestes and the Urn (Sophocles, Electra 54-55)
Trope and Setting in Sophocles’ Electra
Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece
Francis M. Dunn's Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece examines the widespread social and cultural disorientation experienced by Athenians in a period that witnessed the revolution of 411 B.C.E. and the military misadventures in 413 and 404---a disturbance as powerful as that described in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. The late fifth century was a time of vast cultural and intellectual change, ultimately leading to a shift away from Athenian…
Sophocles and the Narratology of Drama
Dynamic Allusion in Sophocles
Late Sophocles
Reviewed by: Late Sophocles: The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus by Thomas Van Nortwick Francis Dunn Thomas Van Nortwick. Late Sophocles: The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 148. $65.00. ISBN 978–0-472–11956–1. Near the end of his life Sophocles, who already had sons by two different wives, took up with a courtesan named Arch…
Art (24 works) · Literature (22 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · History (12 works) · Drama (11 works) · Tragedy (event) (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Narrative (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works)