Celine’s Categorized Bibliography

Commentaries, texts, and translations:

• Cropp, M.J. 1988. Euripides: Electra. Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd.
• Denniston, J.D. 1939. Euripides: Electra. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kovacs, David, eds. and trans. 1998. “Electra.” Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Luschnig, C.A.E. and H.M. Roisman. 2011. Euripides’ Electra: a Commentary. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• Vermeule, Emily Townsend, trans. 2013. “Electra.” Euripides II. The Complete Greek Tragedies (3rd ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The texts above initially served as sweeping introductions for my research, and now are used for reference for any close readings of the Greek.

Third World Feminist Works:

• Lorde, Audre. 1997. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• Lorde, Audre, eds. Roxanne Gay. 2020. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Of Woman Born. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Rich, Adrienne, eds. Sandra M. Gilbert. 2018. Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

All but one of the “books” listed here are actually anthologies containing myriad genres from poetry to prose. Rich and Lorde are currently the two sources I’m drawing on from Third World feminism (and building upon with the intersectional feminist works listed below). The anthologies give me a sense of what are considered to be their seminal works, and the more complete ones (such as the Collected Poems) allow me to draw upon works outside of the commonly studied ones. Within these anthologies, I’m looking at a broad range of works about sexuality and eroticism, its relationship with familial bonds, and its relationship with the written word. I’m using some of this material as secondary source material, and some of it as primary source, doing close readings to highlight nuances that I propose are present within Euripides’ Electra.

Feminist theory in Classics:

• Burnett, Anne Pippin. 1998. Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • I’m reading Burnett primarily in relation to Foley, and using these two authors as representative of views of the general feminist scholarship done about Euripides following the interest in feminist literary criticism during the 80’s. I’m drawing more from Burnett than Foley, who has a kinder reading of Clytemnestra.
• Foley, Helene P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Foley provides a thorough examination of many female characters throughout the extant tragic corpus–this almost reads like an encyclopedia or reference book. I’m focusing primarily on her reading of Euripides’ Clytemnestra, which she compares unfavorably to Aeschylus’s. While jumping off the the methodologies Foley and Burnett propose, I’m trying to reorient and offer a different perspective than what’s proposed in these books.
• Honig, Bonnie. 2011. “Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone.” Arethusa 44 (1): 29-68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44578337 (accessed April 19, 2022).
  • Bonnie Honig is an interdisciplinary political theorist who serves as a model for the application of much of contemporary feminist theory onto Ancient Greek political frameworks. In this article, Honig’s main framework for Sophocles’ Antigone is Jacques Lacan’s idea of a ‘forced choice’: a true ethical choice forces one to adhere to a “pure concept of duty” (51), which is created out of one’s “highly individualized desires,” and thus, feels like a universal maxim to one making an ethical choice (52). However, because of one’s ethical duty, the person making the decision, in fact, has no choice at all: he is driven by his desires to, in fact, only have one choice from the very start. Although this paper mostly focuses on a re-reading of Ismene and Antigone’s enmity to argue for sororal kinship between the two, the idea of a “forced choice” is appealing to the edicts of motherhood as well. It applies more clearly onto Clytemnestra than Elektra, but I think there are different nuances to the idea of choice that this article engenders (as well as responds to Mahmood below), and that I intend to try and explore that relationship with both figures.
• Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin.1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Although the book doesn’t explicitly examine Electra, I’ve found that it provides an excellent foundation for how to think about women in Greek tragedy. I’m currently drawing heavily from its introduction, which has a lot of useful general/background analysis, but I need to read through the rest of the book.
• Zeitlin, Froma. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Zeitlin’s seminal Playing the Other makes up the foundational premise of my project. Zeitlin works with the premise that Greek drama has an outsized focus on the “Other”: usually women and foreigners. She establishes that depictions of the Other ultimately re-establishes the (Greek, male, citizen) self because the best way to understand the self is by putting it in direct contrast with the other. She focuses on theories of mimesis and theatre, focusing on the figure of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae as the ultimate example of this: a male actor, playing a Greek king (the epitome of manhood), playing a woman when he goes up Cithaeron to spy upon the Bacchae. I am especially interested in her chapter on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, pulling from her close reading of Clytemnestra while also pushing back against some of the larger, patriarchal frameworks she identifies when looking at the trilogy as a whole. I also intend to pull extensively from the last part of the book—“Gender and Mimesis: Theatre and Identity”—to understand the use of deception throughout Elektra.
• Zeitlin, Froma. 2008. “Intimate Relations: Children, Childbearing, and Parentage on the Euripidean Stage.” Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, eds. Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/haverford/detail.action?docID=430618 (accessed September 26, 2022).
  • Zeitlin is examining the prevalence of child-mother relationships in Euripides, and proposes that a “good mother” is often put in opposition to a “potential if not actual child destroyer.” Due to the topic, I expect some of this to be cited in my thesis.

Contemporary feminist theory (cross-discipline):

• Deutscher, Penelope. 2017. Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Deutscher is examining the legacy of Foucault and his influences on many key theories like Edelman, Agamben, and Butler. Her goal is to combine his works on biopolitics with those on sex. I’m hoping it will add to some nuances on the understanding of Electra and Clytemnestra.
• Gatens, Moira. 1996. “Corporal representation in/and the body politic.” Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge.
• Hartman, Saidiya. 2014. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: a Journal of Criticism 12(2):1-14. https://doi-org.ezproxy.haverford.edu/10.1215/-12-2-1 (accessed April 15, 2021).
  • Hartman’s understanding of the archive and recuperating the history of the marginalized (in her case, Black enslaved women during the trans-Atlantic slave trade), ties particularly well into the Classics, I think, because the sources we’re using are not only literature but also a source for history. Hartman is also someone frequently cited by Honig in her work, and I’m currently trying to combine Hartman’s methodology in history with the recuperative literary criticism proposed by second-wave feminists such as Yaeger and Rich.
• Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Mahmood’s work is perhaps the ugly duckling to this bibliography; she is an anthropologist rather than a theorist. Politics of Piety is an ethnography published in part as a response to the rise in Islamophobia after 9/11, and in part to the latent version of that bigotry that existed beforehand. Her book focuses on the Islamic Revival Movement of Egypt, particularly the women who led the movement and why these women would “give up” the secular tradition in favor of stricter religious observance. In doing so, she establishes a free/unfree dichotomy of the West and uses theories of positive and negative freedom to establish different nuances of freedom. I am particularly interested in Chapter 1 (The Subject of Freedom) and Chapter 5 (Agency, Gender, and Embodiment) in order to understand the agency and restrictions Clytemnestra and Elektra feel bound by, and how different valences of liberty may have been understood within Ancient Greece. I intend to closely tie these concepts with Bonnie Honig’s ideas about forced choice and the “third choice.”
• Robbins, Ruth. 2000. Literary Feminisms. Transitions. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
  • This book serves as reference to the history and categorization of feminist literary criticism.
• Yaeger, Patricia. 1988. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writings. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Patricia Yaeger voices many of the same concerns as other feminist writers of her time (I was reminded especially of Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”)—that is, the question of the female voice, especially within a male-dominated corpus. Because her work mostly deals with 17^th-19^th century English literature, I don’t think the content of her book is necessarily useful, but rather the broader framework she has established for female recuperation.

Other relevant scholarship (Classics):

• Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet trans. Janet Lloyd. Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece. New Jersey: Humanities Press.
  • This book provides a lot of general/background knowledge on how to think about tragedy.

Other relevant scholarship (cross-discipline):

• Eagleton, Terry. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • A reference text to situate myself in theory.