Opening paragraph for a conference paper
Jan. 12th, 2012 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lb"Something To Do With Dionysos? Performance and transformation in the archaeology of the sanctuaries of Asklepios in Hellenistic Greece, with relation to the theatres at Athens and Epidauros."
Epiphantic healing and theatrical performance are fundamentally transformative occasions. The former has to do with the transformation of a sick body into a healthy one; the latter, as Aristotle said of tragedy, "effects the proper purgation" of the emotions it arouses. Now Aristotle has used the language of medicine to refer to drama: κάθαρσις, he says: purgation, cleansing, purification, and drama and healing cult exist in a similar cathartic conceptual space. The performance of healing and the performance of drama are linked visually and spatially, in the tangible connections of architecture, and in the - far less concrete but nonetheless present - subjective archaeologies of experience. This paper tries, briefly, to relate the two.
Spoken papers require a rather different style than purely written ones, it transpires. The uses of rhetoric, I am learning to appreciate them.
I appear to need to go sit in the library with Travlos' Pictorial Dictionary of Athens and the Nothing to do with Dionysos conference collection. Library: do not want. Next week, maybe. I have a month and a half.
Epiphantic healing and theatrical performance are fundamentally transformative occasions. The former has to do with the transformation of a sick body into a healthy one; the latter, as Aristotle said of tragedy, "effects the proper purgation" of the emotions it arouses. Now Aristotle has used the language of medicine to refer to drama: κάθαρσις, he says: purgation, cleansing, purification, and drama and healing cult exist in a similar cathartic conceptual space. The performance of healing and the performance of drama are linked visually and spatially, in the tangible connections of architecture, and in the - far less concrete but nonetheless present - subjective archaeologies of experience. This paper tries, briefly, to relate the two.
Spoken papers require a rather different style than purely written ones, it transpires. The uses of rhetoric, I am learning to appreciate them.
I appear to need to go sit in the library with Travlos' Pictorial Dictionary of Athens and the Nothing to do with Dionysos conference collection. Library: do not want. Next week, maybe. I have a month and a half.
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Date: 2012-01-12 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-12 05:08 pm (UTC)