Murnaghan, Sheila

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    The Trials of Telemachus: Who Was the Odyssey Meant For?
    (2002-01-01) Murnaghan, Sheila
    A consideration of Telemachus's role in the Odyssey can start with a modern poem: Linda Pastan's "The Son," first published in 1988 as part of a seven-poem sequence entitled "Re-Reading the Odyssey in Middle Age." Because Pastan's poem presents itself as a response to reading the Odyssey, the possible affinities between what a modern poet does in retelling a story found in an ancient text and what a modern critic does in interpreting or "reading" an ancient text are particularly close to the surface here. Pastan's record of her experience as a reader is also a telling account of the interpretive challenges posed by Homer's presentation of Telemachus.
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    Naming Names, Telling Tales: Sexual Secrets and Greek Narrative
    (2014-01-01) Murnaghan, Sheila
    As 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.
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    The Survivors' Song: The Drama of Mourning in Euripides' "Alcestis"
    (1999) Murnaghan, Sheila
    Classical 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.
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    Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy
    (1988) Murnaghan, Sheila