Belief, Make-Believe, and the Religious Imagination:The Case of the Deus Ex Machina in Greek Tragedy

The chapter opens by making the case for a capacious understanding of the psychology of the religious imagination. Psychological capacities and propensities, it is suggested, are enabling as much as they are constraining, and religious actors creatively employ these capacities and propensities as much as they are unknowingly subject to them. The particular phenomenon for which this notion of the religious imagination is then explored in the bulk of the chapter is the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy; the relevant imaginative capacity is the human propensity for make-believe. The chapter argues that both externally, as a form of make-believe, and internally through details of the dialogue between god and characters, deus ex machina scenes pull systematically in two directions: the religious experience they enable is one in which there is room simultaneously for both belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, commitment and distance. A subsidiary strand of the argument aims to contribute to current debates about the notion of ‘belief’ in scholarship on Greek religion. The chapter emphasizes that ‘belief’ is usefully understood as sometimes including an attitudinal dimension. This attitudinal dimension comes to the fore in the deus scenes

I and we: Hannah Arendt, participatory plurality, and the literary scaffolding of collective intentionality

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian concepts through relation and juxtaposition with philosophical and literary texts from different periods, thereby complicating discussions of (1) how individuals participate in, shape, and are shaped by various forms of “We”; (2) how, within collective participation, individuals come to care about being themselves; and (3) to what extent literary texts enable and encourage processes of identity construction and (re)configuration. For Arendt, the “place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (2017, 387–88) is “the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice” (2017, 393)—the shared practices and institutions that Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (2009, 15). In this article, the authors argue that by exploring and critiquing “forms of life” literature can expand the range of activities we recognize as fostering “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 465). The three literary provocations presented here—Callimachus’s “Hymn to Apollo,” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace—all interrogate the situated interactions of “I’s” and “We’s” that instantiate the “participatory plurality” of the shared world

Does believing something to be fiction allow a form of moral licencing or a 'fictive pass' in understanding others' actions?

Introduction: The human capacity to engage with fictional worlds raises important psychological questions about the mechanisms that make this possible. Of particular interest is whether people respond differently to fictional stories compared to factual ones in terms of how immersed they become and how they view the characters involved and their actions. It has been suggested that fiction provides us with a ‘fictive pass’ that allows us to evaluate in a more balanced, detached way the morality of a character’s behaviour. Methods: We use a randomised controlled experimental design to test this. Results and discussion: We show that, although knowing whether a substantial film clip is fact or fiction does not affect how engaged with (‘transported’ by) a troubling story an observer becomes, it does grant them a ‘fictive pass’ to empathise with a moral transgressor. However, a fictive pass does not override the capacity to judge the causes of a character’s moral transgression (at least as indexed by a causal attribution task)

The mediated ending of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus

This article uses the term 'mediated ending', drawn from the work of Germanist Henry Schmidt, to analyse the last scene of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: this scene mediates between the events of the climax and the point when the play is over. It discusses mediation through changes in narrative structure, mediation through the way Oedipus copes with what has happened to him, as well as the relationship of mediation and complexity. There is an appendix on the authenticity of the transmitted ending

Sound and text: the rhythm and metre of archaic and classical Greek poetry in ancient and Byzantine scholarship

This article is concerned with the history of scholarship on archaic and classical Greek rhythm and metre period up to including the Byzantine period. In particular, it discusses the shift from an appreciation of sound to a study of text on the page

Körper und Geist in tragischen Schmerz-Szenen

This article discusses scenes of physical pain in Greek tragedy, drawing on medical research. In particular it focuses on the interaction of body and mind in pain and in the way this affects the representation and use of pain in Greek tragedy

Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu

This chapter is concerned with the latest of several plays by West African authors that draw on Greek tragedies: Femi Osofisan's The Women of Owu, based on Euripides' Women of Troy. It discusses Osofisan's treatment of responsibility, communality, gender, and form and tone; as well as the interrelation of African, ancient Greek and modern European elements in his play. It ends with some broader considerations about Classics and postcolonial studies

The reception of Sophocles' representation of physical pain

Two of Sophocles' surviving tragedies contain scenes that portray the main character in excruciating pain for a sustained period of time: Philoctetes and Trachiniae. This article discusses three important stages in the reception history of these pain scenes: (1) Hercules Oetaeus, attributed to Seneca; (2) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoon treatise; and (3) recent European adaptations. In each case, it analyzes how the later playwrights, directors and theorists responded to certain complexities inherent in Sophocles' representation of pain. The conclusion briefly considers this reception history overall

Greek tragedies in West African adaptations

This article is concerned with West-African plays (all written in the last 50 years) drawing on Greek sources. It discusses the plays both in their own contexts and from the perspective of classicists and audiences in the West