We as modern students of literature sometimes find ourselves silently reading play scripts or song lyrics, interpreting words on the page and therefore perhaps missing the spectacles which first animated those words. Ancient Greeks, I argue, were aware of this discrepancy and explored various ways of addressing it. In this talk I will survey a few examples of Greek authors engaging via text with tragedy performed in theaters hundreds of years before their lifetime, and I will explore their theories of imagined or embedded re-performances—theories which might provide ways for us even now to continue reanimating the literature we read.

Guest Speaker: Alyson Melzer, Assistant Professor, Indiana University Bloomington in the Department of Classical Studies

Bio: Alyson Melzer studies and teaches ancient Greek cultural history, with a focus on performance, aesthetics, and literary criticism. Her current book project explores the centrality of performance and the physical body to conceptualizations of literary language and style in antiquity.