Transformation through performance: theatre conventions, reason, emotion and conscience

• Autores: Lorna Hardwick
• Localización: Connecting rhetoric and Attic drama / Milagros Quijada Sagredo (ed. lit.), María del Carmen Encinas Reguero (ed. lit.), 2017, ISBN 978-88-7949-684-1, págs. 241-264
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This essay explores the potential of Greek tragedy to transform perspectives. The discussion focuses on the relationship between rhetoric, patterns of argument and the poetics of conscience-raising. The theatrical conventions of tragedy provide a field for the interaction of figures of rhetorical argument that both underlie appeals to reason and also deploy the poetics of affect. Both of these are key to the dynamics of persuasion. The two fields of reason and emotion are sometimes polarised by rhetoricians and critics but tragedy shows that to accept simple polarisation between them is to miss the richly layered plurality of meanings that are embedded in text and performance. The transformation of perspectives initiated through theatrical conventions such as the "rhesis", the "agon", the threnody, the choral odes and the messenger speeches plays on the sensibilities of audiences within the play and outside it, with repercussions for theatre practitioners, spectators, critics and scholars down the centuries