Reading Antigone

Instructor: Dr. Kathleen Merrow

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh …. We need to know the writing of the past, and to know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

-Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," College English 34.1 (1972): 18-19.

We will use our reading of the assigned texts to:

1) Acquire a feminist framework for reading the representation of women in Greek tragedy;

2) Follow a particular genealogy of interpretations of Antigone (Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Irigarary, Butler) in the modern period in order to understand the different ways the figure of Antigone has been appropriated.

3) Understand how textual representation fashions and disciplines subjectivity—and can also deconstruct it.

4) Study a contemporary version of Antigone (Fugard’s The Island) as a model for your own work with reading a modern appropriation of a classical tragic female protagonist.

Required Texts

Sophocles: Antigone in Three Theban Plays
Judith Butler: Antigone's Claim (Columbia University Press)

We will also read the following, available on reserve at PSU Library:

Helene P. Foley: Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2001): 172-200
Froma Zeitlin: Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Univ. of Chicago 1996): 87-122
Nicole Loraux: The Experience of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man (Princeton 1995); 183-193
Pat Easterling: “Women in Tragic Space,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 34.1 (1987): 15-26
Luce Irigaray: Speculum of the Other Woman (Cornell, 1985): 214-227 and An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell, 1993): 116-132
Hegel on Tragedy, ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci (Anchor, 1962): 260-73
Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 243-270
Martin Heidegger: Hölderlin’s Hymn Der Ister (Indiana University Press): 51-122
Athol Fugard: The Island