ELECTRA LOST IN TRANSIT

Like all the tragedies about the House of Atreus, Euripides’ Electra dramatizes the political stakes of familial disorder. In the background lies the legendary story of Agamemnon who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia and, after returning from Troy, was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Electra takes place sometime after that murder and political usurpation, with the couple scrambling to secure their rule against the potential threat of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's children. When the play opens, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus have already exiled Orestes from Argos and relocated Electra to its border where she lives in a forced countryside marriage to a poor farmer. Over the course of the play, the siblings reunite and plot the murders of their mother and her new husband. By its end, Orestes and Electra are prepared to say goodbye to each other for good and, under the stain of matricide, to embark on their respective forms of movement, wandering for him and a new marriage for her.

Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz

This chapter explores the ways in which Junot Díaz draws on ancient Greek myth in two of his works, Drown (1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Placing Greek myth alongside the stories from other fantastical worlds, such as those found in the works of Tolkien and Marvel Comics, Díaz offers a pathway to realms seemingly not affected by transatlantic slavery, racism, or modern dictatorship and diaspora. Yet, as much work on magical realism has shown, a turn to the fantastic can be deeply political. Díaz’s evocation of Greek myth (most prominently, those of Homer’s Odyssey and the House of Atreus) is given only as much space as the myths of other times and places, thereby stripping the classical canon of the aura of superiority which it gained during the colonial period. In doing so, Díaz works to creates a new epic for the Dominican diaspora.

Aeschylus’s Oresteia

The Oresteia, the pinnacle, and likely the final production, of Aeschylus’s long career in Athens, was produced at the City Dionysia of 458 bce, where it won the first prize. The Oresteian tetralogy consisted of four plays—Agamemnon, Libation Bearers (Choephori), Eumenides, and the satyr-play, Proteus, which was lost—with the first three plays forming the only trilogy to survive antiquity. Since Aeschylus died in Sicily two years later and there is no evidence of any Athenian productions in the intervening period, Aeschylus likely ended his career victoriously at the City Dionysia with the Oresteia. The theme of the Oresteia, justice, was a particularly urgent concern for a democracy that was still only a half-century old. To address this theme Aeschylus transformed from the Odyssey the myth of the final phases of the House of Atreus: the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and cousin Aegisthus after the sack of Troy, and the consequent matricide committed by their son Orestes. Aeschylus, to maximize the dramatic potential of his theme, re-imagined the myth so that the system of justice as vendetta reaches an absolute crisis in the form of an intra-familial gender war that takes on a cosmic scale that results in the origins of the legal system wherein humans are held accountable for their actions and tried by other humans who are not party to those actions. In addressing justice through the origin of the Areopagus tribunal, Aeschylus, uncharacteristically for Greek tragedy, engaged one of the most explosive political issues of this time, since, a few years earlier, Ephialtes, attempting to check the power of aristocratic institutions like the Areopagus, stripped it of its broader powers, but was assassinated shortly after the changes were instituted. The Oresteia also participated in major changes to Athenian dramaturgy, as Aeschylus used—possibly for the first time—the skēnē building, the wheeled cart (ekkyklêma), and a third actor.

Prophecy, Spoken Otherwise: In the Language of Aeschylus’s Cassandra

No reading of prophetic language, and no reading of Humboldt’s reflections on language, could proceed without attending closely to Cassandra’s speech in the Agamemnon, to which this chapter is devoted. There, it will turn out that translation is the original problem of prophecy, as her utterances cross the registers of vision and speech; Greek and Trojan; human and divine tongues—whereby the divine source that is said to burn through her proves to be itself undecidable, at once reminiscent of the Furies and of their enemy, the oracular God Apollo. While Cassandra’s speech has repeatedly been described in the terms of the sublime, beginning with the earliest Greek hypothesis appended to the play, through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s preface to his Agamemnon, what is most striking about her language is not the past and future horrors of the House of Atreus that her words appear to summon, but, as the chorus will say, her “speaking of an other-speaking city” (1200–1), in another speech that also removes these Argive elders from their proper language.

Commentary on Adele tutter’s “Design as Dream and Self-Representation

In this discussion of Adele Tutter’s “Design as Dream and Self-Representation: Philip Johnson and the Glass House of Atreus” ( JAPA 59/3), the architect Elizabeth Danze and the psychoanalyst Stephen Sonnenberg highlight what they see as the most important of Tutter’s contributions as regards an understanding of Johnson’s work. They then discuss those contributions as they illuminate the study of the relationship of architecture and design, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other.