Papers

“The Persistent Bonds of the Oikos in Euripides’ Heracles,” Classical Quarterly (2022), 1–18. [11,000 words, 18 pages]

Interpretations of Euripides’ Heracles often focus on Theseus’ and Heracles’ cooperative social values in the final scene as a culmination of humanistic themes of philia. I argue that the relationship Theseus forges competes with Heracles’ attachment to his household, oikos, which is the central social relationship Euripides describes. The play’s trajectory suggests a painful misalignment between Heracles’ experience in the oikos and the public position Theseus offers at Athens: of a semi-divine hero receiving public cult and honours. Euripides emphasizes this tension to distinguish the experience of household-membership.

Forthcoming. ‘What Structures Do in Bacchae.’ In Noel, A-S. Brillet-Dubois, P. and Nikolsky, B. eds. Poetics and Politics: New Approaches to Euripides. Éditions de la Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée. [10,300 words, 16 pages]

This article attends to the dynamic presence of two structures in Euripides’ Bacchae (405): Pentheus’ house (the set-building) and the ruined house where Semele died (her mnēma, line 6). I consider the two buildings as a pair encountered meaningfully through the spectators’ constructive perception and rooted in lived experience. Particularly pertinent are parallels of house (and household) trauma in other Attic tragedies and Athenian society, which shaped how an audience engaged with structures in Bacchae. Entangled trajectories of violence join the two staged buildings and spark a number of other off-stage structural violences. The two main structures emerge as dynamic player in the drama, between whom ruin courses, and whose material presences confront an audience with questions surrounding violence in and around the household.

“House-Razing and the Relationship of Oikos and Polis in Euripides’ Heracles” in Illinois Classical Studies 45 (2020), 25–48.

This article shows how the demise of Heracles’s household in Euripides’s Heracles draws upon recognizable public values related to the individual household, oikos, at Classical Athens and reflects upon its vulnerabilities. Threats directed against Heracles’s household implicate a polis which paradigmatically fails to protect one of its households. Among the contemporary resonances of Euripides’ depictions of the exposed oikos, particularly important is the destruction of the physical house. Recurring language of the contemporary punishment of house-razing, kataskaphē, reflects the fraught relationship of Thebes to Heracles and his household.

“Houses that Live and Die: From Greek Tragedy to the Gothic” in The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales, ed. John Lyons. University of Virginia. 299-320.

Is Aeschylus’ haunted house in Agamemnon the tragic progenitor to Edgar Alan Poe’s mock-gothic story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I consider the evidence that Aeschylus’ innovation-of a personified, infested house merging with its inhabitants identities-offers Poe his central, vital house.

PUBLIC FACING

Forthcoming, “Maternal Vision, Violence, and the Tragedy of Clytemnestra” [8,000 words]

In my contribution to a collection of essays by literary scholars on how motherhood impacts our reading and study, I explore my first encounter with Clytemnestra during the months following my first child’s birth. I suggest that Agamemnon dramatizes the vulnerability of a mother’s attunement to the fluid materiality of a family of embodied persons.

IN PROGRESS

“Enacting a House for the Eumenides in the Oresteia.” [10,000 words, 15 pages]

Based on a paper delivered at the 2020 Society for Classical Studies conference in Washington, DC, this article argues that Aeschylus exploits the constructed identity of the set-building as a house so that the audience “enacts” it as a different sort of house—one that has not been noticed—at the end of the Oresteia: the publicly sponsored home for the Eumenides on the Athenian Acropolis. My reading relies on an enactivist attunement to the set-building as a frame upon which the audience enacts meaning as elicited by the performance, to adapt Peter Meineck’s cognitive vocabulary for interpreting the anchoring capacity of tragic masks (Meineck 2018, 79–111). I propose that this unseen structure at the end of the trilogy is present concretely enough that it is likely the Eumenides concluded the play by processing with Athena through the set-building/home.