Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature

by Chris Kraus (Editor)

Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE became an international and a canonical genre with remarkable rapidity. It is, therefore, a remarkable test case through which to explore how a genre becomes privileged and what the cultural effects of its continuing appropriation are. In this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished scholars the particular point of reference is the visual, that is, the myriad ways in which tragic texts are (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and (re)visualized through verbal and artistic description. Topics treated include the interaction of comedy and dithyramb with tragedy; vase painting and tragedy; representations of Dionysus, of Tragoedia, and of Nike; Homer, Aeschylus, Philostratus, and Longus; choral lyric and ritual performance, choral victories, and the staging of choruses on the modern stage. The common focus of all the essays is an engagement with and response to the unique scholarly voice of Froma Zeitlin.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published July 26, 2007

About the author

Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.