Murnaghan, Sheila
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Publication Naming Names, Telling Tales: Sexual Secrets and Greek Narrative(2014-01-01) Murnaghan, SheilaAs Creusa finds the courage to reveal her long-concealed union with Apollo, Euripides aligns the powerful narrative at the heart of his Ion with the disclosure of a sexual secret. Such disclosures make good stories, interesting in part for their sexual content, but even more, I suggest, for the circumstances that lead to their telling. As Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot, narratives engage us in the desires of their characters, which we follow through a trajectory of frustration and fulfillment, propelled by a corresponding passion for knowledge. Among the strongest of those desires, more powerful even than erotic longing or material ambition, is the wish to tell one’s own story, “the more nearly absolute desire to be heard, recognized, listened to” (Brooks 1984: 53), so that narratives often include an account of their own origin in a character’s quest for recognition. But a story like Creusa’s can only be told after a difficult struggle with fear and shame, which have to be overcome before one party in a sexual encounter breaks the bond of silence to reveal what had been a shared and exclusive secret.Publication Reviewed Work: The Unity of the Odyssey by George Dimock(1992) Murnaghan, SheilaPublication Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy(1988) Murnaghan, SheilaPublication Legal Action: The Trial As Theater in Aeschylus' Oresteia(2002-01-01) Murnaghan, SheilaAeschylus' Oresteia is a key text for analyzing the relationship between law and drama both because it includes the earliest surviving instance of a trial scene in western drama and because it is explicitly concerned with the nature of trials, telling a story of repeated conflict that can only be resolved by the invention of the trial as a new form of action. First produced in Athens in 458 B.C, the Oresteia is a set of three connected tragedies, of which the final one, the Eumenides, concludes with the mythical first trial of a man for homicide, the trial of Orestes, the character who gives the trilogy its name. Orestes is tried for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra, a murder undertaken at the instigation of the god Apollo in retaliation for Clytemnestra's earlier murder of her husband Agamemnon, Orestes' father and the leader of the Greek expedition against Troy; in turn, retaliation for Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia is one of Clytemnestra's several motives for his murder. These murders take place in Argos, the city ruled by Agamemnon's family, the House of Atreus, but the trial of Orestes takes place in Athens at a court, the court of the Areopagus, which is brought into being by the goddess Athena to adjudicate cases of homicide on this occasion and in the future. The trial in the Eumenides is at once a conclusion-the conclusion to the story of Orestes and his family-and a beginning-the inaugural use of this new court and the inauguration of legal action rather than revenge as the appropriate consequence of an act such as Orestes' matricide.Publication The Survivors' Song: The Drama of Mourning in Euripides' "Alcestis"(1999) Murnaghan, SheilaClassical Athenian tragedy is often thought of as a genre of poetry about death. Its plots center on the deaths—violent, untimely, self-inflicted, or brought about by unwitting philoi—of certain individuals who dominate the plays in which they appear: Agamemnon, Ajax, Oedipus, Antigone, Pentheus, Hippolytus, Heracles. Drawing its audience into the experience of those characters, tragedy forces that audience to look death in the face, to learn what it might be like to see death coming or to be overtaken by it suddenly, to choose and welcome death or to fight it unsuccessfully. But no more than any other genre can tragedy actually represent the experience of death. However skillfully the poet may build a link of identification between spectator and character, that link is severed with the character's life and the spectator is given a vicarious experience: the opportunity to make sense of someone else's death. This might be viewed as a limitation of the genre—although it is a limitation shared with the human imagination itself, which can never really envision what it is like to die—or, alternatively, as its proper business, for tragedy is arguably as much about the experience of surviving others' deaths as it is about dying.Publication Publication Myths of the Greeks: The Origins of Mythology in the Works of Edith Hamilton and Robert Graves(2009-01-01) Murnaghan, SheilaThis paper concerns two popular myth collections that date from the mid-twentieth century: Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, first published in 1940, and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, first published in 1955. The dates of these collections mean that they are close enough to us that they are still considered current: both are still widely read, and are both are still in print, in an interesting variety of editions. But they are also far enough away from us that we can identify with some precision the ways in which they are shaped by the preoccupations of their period. In particular, both now reveal themselves as over-reactions, although in opposite directions, to the early twentieth century rediscovery of classical culture, especially Greek culture, as primitive, as comparable to the traditional cultures studied by anthropologists.Publication Review of: J.B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.(1992) Murnaghan, SheilaPublication The Misadventure of Staying Home: Thwarted Nostos in De Chirico and Rebecca West(2014-01-01) Murnaghan, SheilaFrom the Odyssey onwards, the long nostos tradition has at times called J attention to a paradoxical insight: the challenges and rewards of homecoming can be experienced by those who never leave home. If being at home means more than being physically located in a certain place, then the dynamics of presence and absence, loss and recovery, that make up nostos can be played out within a single setting. Something new can be gained that makes the non-traveler somehow more "at home" than before. Or the obstacles to a successful experience of outward journey and smooth reintegration may not be intrusions from the outside, but internal, homegrown impediments.Publication Whose Story Is It? Issues of Narrative Control in the "Odyssey"(2005-01-01) Murnaghan, Sheila