Mario Telò

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...

Queer Euripides: Re-readings in Greek Tragedy

Mario Telò
Sarah Olsen
2022

This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays have long been seen as a valuable source for understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, scholars of Greek tragedy have only recently begun to engage with queer theory and its ongoing developments. Queer Euripides represents a vital step in exploring the productive perspectives on classical...

Representations,158: Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler

Mario Telò
Debarati Sanyal
Damon Young
2022

TO READ JUDITH BUTLER IS to read in community, joining what are now generations of readers around the world. It is to court the experience of disorientation, exhilaration, alienation, or uncanny recognition that entering (however incompletely) into the thought of another variously affords. To read Butler is also to read Butler reading and thus to encounter both the example and the challenge of reading well. In creating this special issue, we invited a number of Butler’s readers to think and write alongside Butler, unfolding lines of flight from a passage of their choice that has served, as...

Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical

Mario Telò
2024

This edited volume seeks to draw the reader toward unconventional networks and the connections found in ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as the poetic traditions developed in the Black Americas. Subdivided into three parts, the chapters combine studies of poetics in ancient and modern contexts, exploring subversions of the canonical and formal resistances to the hegemony of textual order. ‘Radical formalism’ is the term given to strategies for defamiliarising – revitalizing while disrupting and unsettling – modes of formalistic reading practiced in deconstructionism,...

Greek Tragedy In A Global Crisis

Mario Telò
2023

Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading through Pandemic Times by Mario Telò.

What does it mean to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, a global crisis? How can Greek tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? One of the outstanding and most widely read theorists in the discipline, Mario Telò, brings together a deep understanding of Greek tragedy and its most famous icons with contemporary times. In close readings of plays such as Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Hecuba, Oedipus the King, Prometheus Bound, and Trojan Women, our experience is precariously refracted...