Judith Butler writes: "to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' ...to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project."
In his tragedies, Euripides's women are powerful, nonconformist, and independent; however, they are also agents of chaos who sow devastation and destruction of domestic space. The Medea follows an alienated foreign protagonist consumed by obsession with revenge that culminates in the murder of her own children; the Bacchae follows women celebrating a female-only religious practice that ends in a frenzied, animalistic slaughter of one of their own sons. Exploring the corpus of Euripides's work through the lens of feminist theory, phenomenology, and postmodern critical theory, this course will ask whether the resistance of women in Euripidean tragedy to "[obey] a historically delimited possibility" is constitutive of a righteous proto-feminism, or rather a sensationalized stage device which reinforces Athenian society's strict gender roles. Over the course of the semester, we will translate Euripides's Medea from the original Greek. We will also read a number of tragedies in translation, focusing in particular on Euripides's Bacchae, while comparing Euripides's works to other tragedians' such as Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Sophocles's Antigone. Students will complete independent comparative projects examining similar themes and characters in modern works. |