Euripides’s Orestes and Post-Critique

Critique queries the political subtexts and didactic intentions of Euripides’s Orestes. Can we tolerate looking beyond the political and the didactic and asking different sorts of questions? One might consider other kinds of work that Orestes does: how does the play transport its recipients into its storyworld? how does it get them to connect with its characters? These are the sorts of questions prioritized by post-critique, a now well-established enterprise, but one that has only recently found a purchase in the study of ancient Greek literature. Post-critique has its defenders and its detractors. Euripides’s Orestes provides a strategic site for classicists to continue their participation in this conversation. This talk’s post-critical query explores how the following four factors catch a recipient’s attention and keep them engrossed: (1) The play operates in the manner of fan fiction. (2) The play prioritizes failure (until it doesn’t). (3) The play utilizes melodramatic devices. (4) The play revels in a trash aesthetic.

Support for this project is provided in part by Princeton’s Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, Humanities Council, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University Public Lectures Committee, Program in Humanistic Studies, and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies