Mario Telò

Eupolis Demoi

Mario Telò
2007

In un'epoca perennemente alla ricerca di un'identità e ansiosa di ritrovare in un passato immaginario i propri padri spirituali non può che apparire di grande attualità una commedia come i Demi di Eupoli che portava in scena, facendoli risuscitare dall'Oltretomba, quattro 'mostri sacri' della storia politica ateniese (Solone, Milziade, Aristide, Pericle). Questo libro, che fornisce un testo critico, la traduzione e, per la prima volta, un commento sistematico di tutti i frammenti superstiti, tenta di ricostruire l'articolazione...

Comedy and the Discourse of Genres

Mario Telò
2013

Recent scholarship has acknowledged that the intertextual discourse of ancient comedy with previous and contemporary literary traditions is not limited to tragedy. This book is a timely response to the more sophisticated and theory-grounded way of viewing comedy's interactions with its cultural and intellectual context. It shows that in the process of its self-definition, comedy emerges as voracious and multifarious with a wide spectrum of literary, sub-literary and paraliterary traditions, the engagement with which emerges as central to its projected literary identity and,...

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis

Mario Telò
2023

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression?

The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction,...

Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler

Mario Telò
2024

Considering Butler's “tragic trilogy”-a set of interventions on Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Bacchae, and Aeschylus's Eumenides-this book seeks to understand not just how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy, but also how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking, even when their gaze is directed elsewhere. Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler's writing. It shows how Butler's mode of reading tragedy-and, crucially, reading tragically-offers a distinctive ethico-political response to the harrowing...

Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory

Mario Telò
Andrew Benjamin
2024

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both...

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Mario Telò
2016

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals?

Telò boldly traces Aristophanes’s rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close...

The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Mario Telò
Melissa Mueller
2018

Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect, providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

The so-called new materialisms have complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and irreducible...

Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy

Mario Telò
2020

Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy may be the most sophisticated application of postmodern paradigms to Greek tragedy to date. This original and truly bold study will appeal to the cross-set of readers who are familiar with both Greek tragedy and postmodern theory.” —Mark Padilla

“Mario Telò’s book is one of the most astonishingly original, learned, and engaging pieces of Classical scholarship. It is truly a vanguard work on several different fronts. It is the kind of work that not only the field of Classics, but contemporary literary criticism in general, has...