A01=Rush Rehm
Aegeus
Aegina
Aegisthus
Aeschylus
Antithesis
Apollo
Atreus
Author_Rush Rehm
Auton
Bithynia
Category=DSBB
Category=DSG
Cerberus
Cithaeron
City Of
Clytemnestra
Cyclops
Cycnus
Deity
Dionysus
Eleusis
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Euripides
Evocation
Geryon
Gorgon
Greek tragedy
Heterotopia (space)
Hyades (mythology)
Intertextuality
Iphigenia in Aulis
Jocasta
Knossos
Laius
Living Space
Maenad
Memory play
Mental space
Neleus
Neoptolemus
Odysseus
Oedipus at Colonus
Oedipus the King
Oresteia
Other Space
Peloponnese
Pentheus
Philoctetes
Philoctetes (Sophocles play)
Phratry
Physical Energy (sculpture)
Polydorus
Polymestor
Polynices
Polyxena
Priam
Prometheus Bound
Pyre
Satyr play
Solipsism
Sophocles
Spatialization
Spherical Earth
Stasimon
Tecmessa
The Bacchae
Theatre of Dionysus
Themistocles
Theseus
Thrasybulus
Tiresias
Tristan and Iseult
Trojan War
Tyndareus
Product details
- ISBN 9780691058092
- Weight: 794g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 May 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Is "space" a thing, a container, an abstraction, a metaphor, or a social construct? This much is certain: space is part and parcel of the theater, of what it is and how it works. In The Play of Space, noted classicist-director Rush Rehm offers a strikingly original approach to the spatial parameters of Greek tragedy as performed in the open-air theater of Dionysus. Emphasizing the interplay between natural place and fictional setting, between the world visible to the audience and that evoked by individual tragedies, Rehm argues for an ecology of the ancient theater, one that "nests" fifth-century theatrical space within other significant social, political, and religious spaces of Athens. Drawing on the work of James J. Gibson, Kurt Lewin, and Michel Foucault, Rehm crosses a range of disciplines--classics, theater studies, cognitive psychology, archaeology and architectural history, cultural studies, and performance theory--to analyze the phenomenology of space and its transformations in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
His discussion of Athenian theatrical and spatial practice challenges the contemporary view that space represents a "text" to be read, or constitutes a site of structural dualities (e.g., outside-inside, public-private, nature-culture). Chapters on specific tragedies explore the spatial dynamics of homecoming ("space for returns"); the opposed constraints of exile ("eremetic space" devoid of normal community); the power of bodies in extremis to transform their theatrical environment ("space and the body"); the portrayal of characters on the margin ("space and the other"); and the tragic interactions of space and temporality ("space, time, and memory"). An appendix surveys pre-Socratic thought on space and motion, related ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and, as pertinent, later views on space developed by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, and Einstein. Eloquently written and with Greek texts deftly translated, this book yields rich new insights into our oldest surviving drama.
Rush Rehm is Associate Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford University and a freelance theater director. He is the author of Marriage to Death (Princeton) and Greek Tragic Theater.
