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

by Ruffell, Ian

• ISBN13: 9780199587216
• ISBN10: 0199587213
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-02-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The collision of politics and claims of political intervention with the fantastic, absurd, and impossible is characteristic of the Athenian comic drama of the late fifth and early fourth century BCE, and has proved persistently problematic for critics. This book sets the impossible centre-stage and argues that comic impossibility should not be ignored in political readings or, conversely, used as a reason for excluding comedy from political interventions, but that anti-realism andthe absurd are precisely the mechanisms through which this sort of comedy had political and social effects, manipulated its audience, and maintained its position in an environment of many competing political claims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical paradigms, from semiotics and humour theorythrough to ancient literary criticism, this book seeks to articulate a model of comic narrative and argument that can be applied equally both to the impossible worlds of Old Comedy and those of related forms of comedy in other traditions. This model emphasizes complex and provisional conceptual development over the linear and inflexible models of traditional models of comic narrative, and makes the joke and routine the base elements of comic plot. Pervasive comic self-reflexivity('metatheatre') is presented as a special case of comic impossibility and one that intensifies and consolidates audience response. The on-going dialogue with comic rivals and performance forms provides both foundational matter for comic worlds and a competitive dimension to those worlds, an argument about the bestkind of comic world and a demonstration that comic anti-realism has the political and conceptual measure of its more widely-recognized and supposedly realist rivals.

Author Biography

Ian Ruffell has been Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow since 2001; previously a research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford (2000-01); lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford (1999-2000), and The Queen's College, Oxford (1998-9).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations and references	p. xi
Tripping over the light fantastic	p. 1
Plato's comedy store	p. 6
The art of the impossible	p. 18
Possible worlds and comic fictions	p. 29
Possible, impossible, and fictional worlds	p. 30
Illusion, fiction, and make-believe	p. 36
Between worlds: identification, mapping, and reference	p. 47
Logic, cognition, and emotion	p. 52
On eating cake: joke semiotics	p. 54
Is laughter central to komoidia?	p. 55
Metaphors and other jokes	p. 60
Towards a theory of the joke	p. 86
Summary	p. 110
Comic motivation: jokes and episodic plot	p. 112
Comic plot and narrative	p. 114
Jokes in narrative	p. 120
A dog's dinner: complex routines in Wasps	p. 127
Episodic plot	p. 155
Comic networks: story and argument	p. 157
Comic structure	p. 158
World, episode, and argument: Akharnians	p. 170
Jokes, concepts, and-comic meaning: Knights	p. 179
How did we learn today?	p. 211
Entering the metaverse: comic self-reference	p. 214
Disruptive theory	p. 215
Thinking the unthinkable	p. 221
The limits of self-reference	p. 238
Chorus and consistency	p. 249
The comic multiplier	p. 253
Strangely significant worlds	p. 259
The role of the audience: ideology, identity, and intensity	p. 261
Constructing the audience	p. 264
Prom worlds to stage: mapping audiences	p. 286
Dionysiac worlds/festive worlds	p. 302
Anti-realism, metatheatre, and fantasy politics	p. 311
Flights of fancy: tragic myth and comic logos	p. 314
Parody, intertextuality, and anti-realism	p. 317
Tragic and comic possibilities	p. 340
Parody, anti-realism, and postmodernist poetics	p. 358
A total write-off: continuity and competition	p. 361
Comic intertextuality: iterability and innovation	p. 362
The comic multiverse: world, story, and plot	p. 376
Comic populations: satire and stereotype	p. 404
What's so funny? About Peace and comic understanding	p. 410
Comic competition	p. 426
Conclusion: politics, ideology, and Old Comedy	p. 427
Bibliography	p. 431
Index locorum	p. 465
General index	p. 487
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