Překotný hlas, truchlivé čtení
A Hurried Voice, a Mournful Read:

On Nicole Loraux’s Essay on Greek Tragedy

Summary/Abstract: Nicole Loraux’s book The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy focuses in its main part on the ways of expressing mourning in Greek tragedy, and understands mourning in tragedy as a borderline between (in)articulated words and music. This approach appears to be useful in interpreting some lyrical passages in which the contemporary reader may easily miss the semantic role of the acoustic dimension of the passage. However, my review essay discusses in detail how, apart from some interesting partial observations, the author fails in all the main ways, turning a partial interpretation into a general statement about the genre of tragedy as a whole. The author’s general thesis is modelled on the artificial oppositions of aulos — lyre, Apollo — Dionysos, which point to another artificial scheme, created by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, rather than to the poetic-performative culture of classical Greece. The author’s following of this scheme leads in the end to a misinterpretation of the specific passages from the tragedies on which she builds her interpretation.

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