Seeing the invisible

Interior Spaces and Uncanny Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20071827
AutoresEmmanuela Bakola (autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Páginas163-186
Data de publicação2018-03-05
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoCHAPTER
PeriódicoGaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/9783110571288-009
OpenAlexW2786509391
ISBN9783110571288
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas13

Interior spaces, "seen" and "unseen" in Greek tragedyIt hardly needs to be stated that the visible and the invisible lay at the very heart of fifth-century Greek theatre.Greek theatre took place in the open, in the bright light of day, with the sun illuminating the natural spaces that hosted the event.This is a striking contrast with tragedy's common themes of the dark sides of human nature, the suppressed memories of terrible deeds, the unexpressed desires hidden in the recesses of the human psyche, and the darkness of death and Hades; this contrast between the "seen" and the "unseen" may be one of the genre's most paradoxical features.Flooded by the brilliant natural light of Greece, how did the theatrical event represent physically the hidden, the suppressed, the unconscious, the "unseen"?Several decades ago, studies informed by structural anthropology showed that the way Greek tragedy used theatrical space was crucial for its representation of the "unseen".They demonstrated in particular that the fundamental contrasts of light and dark, known and unknown, public and private, seen and unseen, centred around the extraordinarily multivalent space within the stage building (the skene) and its contrast with the exterior. 1 In the theatre, interior spaces do not only function as representations of buildings such as houses, palaces and temples, nor as spaces that can be "realistically" entered and exited by characters, like tents and groves.They also function as symbolic interiors capturing "deep" spaces like the mind, the memory, the psyche and bodily innards like the mouth and the womb

Aesthetics · Art · Uncanny · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Classical Antiquity Studies