Tragedies of Disintegration: Balkanizing Greco-Roman Antiquity
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Greenwood, Emily
Abstract
This dissertation examines the reception of ancient Athenian tragedy in contemporary Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav adaptations that thematize the violent disruption of former Yugoslavia. Although my archival research brought many more adaptations to light, the forms of cultural production on which I focus in this dissertation are two films— Theo Angelopoulos’ 1995 film Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze) and Mario Martone’s Teatro di Guerra (1998)— and three plays: Goran Stefanovski’s adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, Pjer Žalica’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Ajax, and Yannis Zervos’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, a play titled A Cry for Peace, which was directed by Nikos Koundouros. In this dissertation, I propose that Yugoslavia stands simultaneously outside an imagined “West” and neatly enclosed inside of it (flanked as it is by Italy to the northwest and Greece to the southeast). In arguing that the erstwhile federation of Yugoslavia and its disintegration represent a fraught object of European identification, I suggest that the “balkanization” of Yugoslavia in the eye of the West should be considered the photographic negative of the idealization of ancient Greece that is rooted in neo-Hellenizing narratives of the Western imagination. The goal of this project is twofold. One the one hand, I am eager to present this growing archive of “balkan(izing)” adaptations to scholars interested in the reception of the ancient Greek tradition in contexts of political urgency, forced displacement, and historical trauma. In recent years, several scholars have troubled the imagined space occupied in “Western” society by Greco-Roman antiquity and the epistemological gaze through which ancient Athens and Rome have been approached for decades in the academy. This archive challenges the fantasy that Greece and Rome are the birthplace of everything that is civilized about the Western world from a unique perspective insofar as it puts into focus the supposedly “no man’s land” connecting the Greek and the Italic peninsulas. One the other hand, I see these adaptations as springboards for establishing a dialogue between ancient texts and contemporary plays that collapses old models of centers and peripheries; rethinks the debate around community, trauma, and language in a postcolonial/Third-Worldist framework; and advances a theory and practice of translation.
Recommended Citation
Todorovic, Nebojsa, "Tragedies of Disintegration: Balkanizing Greco-Roman Antiquity" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1122.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1122
