Murnaghan, Sheila
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Publication Review of: Charles Martindale, Richard F. Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.(2007-01-01) Murnaghan, SheilaPublication Andrew Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.(1993) Murnaghan, SheilaPublication Review of: Irene de Jong. A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.(2003-01-01) Murnaghan, SheilaPublication How a Woman Can Be More Like a Man: The Dialogue Between Ischomachus and his Wife in Xenophone's Oeconomicus(1988) Murnaghan, SheilaThe dialogue between the model Athenian landowner Ischomachus and his wife recounted in Xenophon's Oeconomicus appears to offer a rare glimpse of the inner workings of an -ordinary Athenian household and a rare portrait of an ordinary Athenian wife. Through Ischomachus's report to Socrates of a series of conversations in which he instructed his wife in her proper activities. the dialogue provides both an account of the occupations of an Athenian wife and observations on her role in the household by both herself and her husband.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 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 Publication Review of: J.B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.(1992) Murnaghan, Sheila