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

by Ruffell, Ian

• ISBN13: 9780191731297
• ISBN10: 0191731293
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2012-02-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

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

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