Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible

Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible

The comic drama of the late fifth and early fourth century BCE was typified by the combination of absurd and fantastic plots, often dealing with social and political issues of the day. This study puts these elements centre-stage and argues that it was through them that the comedy of the period made its political interventions.

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Inhaltsangabe

1 TRIPPING OVER THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
1.1 Plato s comedy store
1.2 The art of the impossible
2 POSSIBLE WORLDS AND COMIC FICTIONS
2.1 Possible, impossible and fictional worlds
2.2 Illusion, fiction and make-believe
2.3 Between worlds: identification, mapping and reference
2.4 Logic, cognition and emotion
3 ON EATING CAKE: JOKE SEMIOTICS
3.1 Is laughter central to komoidia?
3.2 Metaphors and other jokes
3.3 Towards a theory of the joke
3.4 Summary
4 COMIC MOTIVATION: JOKES AND EPISODIC PLOT
4.1 Comic plot and narrative
4.2 Jokes in narrative
4.3 A dog s dinner: complex routines in Wasps
4.4 Episodic plot
5 COMIC NETWORKS: STORY AND ARGUMENT
5.1 Comic structure
5.2 World, episode and argument: Akharnians
5.3 Jokes, concepts and comic meaning: Knights
5.4 How did we learn today?
6 ENTERING THE METAVERSE: COMIC SELF-REFERENCE
6.1 Disruptive theory
6.2 Thinking the unthinkable
6.3 The limits of self-reference
6.4 Chorus and consistency
6.5 The comic multiplier
6.6 Strangely significant worlds
7 THE ROLE OF THE AUDIENCE: IDEOLOGY, IDENTITY AND INTENSITY
7.1 Constructing the audience
7.2 From worlds to stage: mapping audiences
7.3 Dionysiac worlds/festive worlds
7.4 Anti-realism, Metatheatre, and fantasy politics
8 FLIGHTS OF FANCY: TRAGIC MYTH AND COMIC LOGOS
8.1 Parody, intertextuality and anti-realism
8.2 Tragic and comic possibilities
8.3 Parody, anti-realism and postmodernist poetics
9 A TOTAL WRITE-OFF: CONTINUITY AND COMPETITION
9.1 Comic intertextuality: iterability and innovation
9.2 The comic multiverse: world, story and plot
9.3 Comic populations: satire and stereotype
9.4 What s so funny? About Peace and comic understanding
9.5 Comic competition
10 CONCLUSION: POLITICS, IDEOLOGY AND OLD COMEDY
INDEX LOCORUM
GENERAL INDEX