Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium presents, Sarah Olsen & Naomi Weiss “An Orestes for the 21st Century: Commentary as Criticism and the Myth of Objectivity”
Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium presents, Sarah Olsen & Naomi Weiss “An Orestes for the 21st Century: Commentary as Criticism and the Myth of Objectivity”
Presented by: Sarah Olsen (Associate Professor of Classics at Williams College) and Naomi Weiss (Professor of the Classics at Harvard University) Euripides’ Orestes, first produced in 408 BCE, was one of the most popular tragedies in the ancient Greek and Byzantine worlds. It is also a play suited to a range of current scholarly and cultural interests, from ancient music to queer reimaginations of antiquity to the construction of race in ancient Greece, while the ways it pushes the boundaries of form and genre look increasingly at home among today’s postmodern and experimental theater. At present, however, work on Orestes is hampered by the absence of a modern English commentary. In this talk, we will discuss our approach to creating such a commentary, as well as broader questions about the purpose, audience, and unexamined assumptions of the commentary as a scholarly genre in the 21st century. The commentary, a vital resource in the study of any ancient Greek drama, is considered the most traditional and conservative form of scholarship in Classics. It is typically presented as objective, with a single answer for each apparent problem with the text, from confusing syntax to questions about performance. Yet in fact the commentary is a […]
