Euripideanism: Euripides, Orientalism and the dislocation of the Western self

No Greek tragedian has been more fiercely condemned for inconsistencies, paradoxes, and instabilities in his drama than Euripides. In fact, Euripidean tragedy, via his construction of Asian female characters, represented and complicated notions of racial, ethnic, gender and class difference in the fifth century BCE, and continues to pose structural problems for contemporary philologists. Using a variety of texts and cross-disciplinary theoretical approaches, this project explores the transmission of Euripidean thought as one of the many ways in which the classical Greek world and Western notions of the "classical" exist as shifting and precarious objects in relation to the contemporary moment. Chapter One examines Euripides' paradoxical position as an object of neoclassicism in nineteenth-century Europe, focusing on the problematic and non-traditional ways in which Euripides' influence haunts and troubles neoclassical ideology and on the unstable relationship between this influence and the development of the "classical," discipline-specific education. Chapter Two explores several Euripidean tragedies (Andromache, Hecuba and Helen in their fifth-century contexts and suggest that by looking at what have been classified as the structurally unstable aspects of Euripidean tragedy (which are often connected to his orientalist plays) a less stable and more complicated history of the Western "self" becomes visible. Chapter Three considers the circulation of Euripidean tragedy and its effects on the development of French tragedy. By comparing the sixteenth-century works of George Buchanan and seventeenth-century tragedy of Jean Racine (both profoundly Influenced by Euripides) this chapter locates the erasure of heterogeneous questions around race, class and gender that allowed for a more "enlightened" notion of a universal subject to emerge as the French nation began to define itself, which, in turn, problematizes homogeneous notions of a unified, pan-European history of orientalist discourse. The final chapter, which acts as a conclusion, looks at Pier Paolo Pasolini's use of Euripides'Medea (for his film Medea) as a means for an articulation of a queer politics, or a plea for the cultural survival of counterpublics, in the face of what Pasolini considered to be a hegemonic, neo-fascist, Italian historical narrative of cultural and economic progress since World War II.