Scan barcode
A review by rheckner
Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jean-Pierre Vernant
4.0
This is a brilliant and challenging set of essays by two of the eminent classicists of a previous generation. It took me months to finish for a number of reasons: (1) I kept setting it aside for weeks and weeks without thinking to pick it up and (2) I am still struggling to delineate reading texts for pleasure and general knowledge/ interest and reading texts for technical depth and complete understanding. I tend to the second model of reading, which though academically and intellectually useful, is not sustainable if used for every book one attempts to read at every time. This book was a test of my ability to read for interesting without reading for complete understanding of all academic nuances— that I started it in August and finished in February, seems to indicate that I have work to do on this front.
Coming out of this personal aside — this book stands, in my mind, as an influential and insightful work on Ancient Greek tragedy that is at once innovative in reading and drives on back to the source material again and again. The essays are always sensitive to the nuances, difficulties, and paradoxes of tragic language; however, the essays do not read as dry technical papers on lexical definition (though as an aspiring lexicographer and philologist, I might be hard pressed to find a paper on lexical definition that I would call dry and technical). Of particular interest to me were: “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” and “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex.”
Coming out of this personal aside — this book stands, in my mind, as an influential and insightful work on Ancient Greek tragedy that is at once innovative in reading and drives on back to the source material again and again. The essays are always sensitive to the nuances, difficulties, and paradoxes of tragic language; however, the essays do not read as dry technical papers on lexical definition (though as an aspiring lexicographer and philologist, I might be hard pressed to find a paper on lexical definition that I would call dry and technical). Of particular interest to me were: “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” and “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex.”