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Tragic language of silence. Euripides' Alcestis at the limit of the tragic genre
Černý, Lukáš ; Sarkissian, Alena (advisor) ; Čechvala, Jakub (referee)
Lukáš Černý Tragic language of silence Abstract The thesis deals with the transgression of the tragic genre in Euripides'Alcestis, which as a moment can be found in the last scene of the play where Alcestis is mute after her return from the underworld. I am not concerned with the play's trespassing towards the genres of comedy or satyr drama however, as numerous scholars are, but merely with its fulfilment and violation of the tragic form. To uphold tragedy as the genre most relevant to the play's interpretation, I represent the play as an ultimate development of the tragic irony but, most of all, I regard the tragic characteristics of the Alcestis herself. As a tragic character, Alcestis dies to save the polis (much more than to save her husband), she reestablishes the natural order of death and, thanks to her capacity for tragic speech, she also wins immortality of a certain sort. But when she is brought back from the dead as a mute passive object, as Victoria Wohl puts it, the purpose of her death, language, and therefore her existence itself is disclaimed. With this ending being worse than tragic, Alcestis finds herself at the brink of the tragic form. In regarding this final moment as trangressive with respect to the genre of tragedy, I rely on Walter Benjamin's and Terry Eagleton's accounts of the...
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The Dramatic Shaping of Myth: Tradition, Manipulation, Interpretation
Čechvala, Jakub ; Fischerová, Sylva (advisor) ; Stehlíková, Eva (referee) ; Sarkissian, Alena (referee)
This dissertation is focused on problems of interpretation of the Greek tragedy. This issue is pursued on the general level by means of examples of several chosen interpretative strategies as well as on a more practical and concrete level by analysis of a particular tragic work, namely Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides. The introductory chapter defines the tragedy - within the original context - as a part and another manifestation of what is today depicted as a song or performance culture. In contrast to this performative setting of the tragedy stands an Aristotelian underestimation of the theatrical level in favour of reading. This contrast, in a sense, initiated a crucial critical problem which still continues in the present time. After an outline of important changes in modern scholarship on Greek tragedy, which took place mainly under the influence of growing interest in theory during the late 1960s, the first chapter deals with a critical analysis of three interpretative approaches to Greek tragedy: literary close reading, religiousritualistic close reading and performance criticism. The literary close reading and performance criticism are analyzed on the basis of their approach to a "text - theatre" relationship. In the case of religious-ritualistic close reading the ways it interprets tragedian's use...
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