Stavroula Kyritsi, "Comic emotions then and now"

Talk Description: My talk will focus on the difference between the way emotions are conceived in antiquity and in modern culture, with special reference to the theatre. I will refer in particular to a survey I carried out in the summer of 2023 on a modern production of Aristophanes’ lays Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae, staged by the Municipal Theatre of Larisa, Greece, where I distributed questionnaires to audiences in three different Greek cities and collected their views on what kind of emotions the play aroused in them and what aspects of the adaptation elicited these emotions. I also interviewed the translator, director, music composer and actors of the play, inquiring what emotions and social or political messages they wished to communicate to the modern audience. More generally, I am looking to explore the contrast between the emotional lexicons of ancient and Modern Greek, a theme that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been investigated until now. An example relevant to the theatre is the contrast between pity, which Aristotle speaks of as a characteristic emotion elicited by tragedy, and the emphasis today on empathy, which suggests an identification with the characters on stage rather than the psychological distance implied by pity. A comparative study, to which the present project is preliminary, promises to shed light on subtle differences between the ancient and modern emotional communities

Short Biography: Stavroula Kyritsi holds a bachelor’s degree in Philology from the University of Athens, and a MA and PhD in Classics from the University of London. She is currently a Tsakopoulos Hellenic Studies Center Fellow at Sacramento State University in California. She is an honorary Researcher in the Department of Classics, Royal Holloway University of London. Her research interests lie in classical Greek drama, especially comedy, and its modern reception, and in Aristotle’s philosophy, especially his theory of character and emotions. She has published the book, Menander’s Characters in Context: From the 4th Century BC to the Modern Greek stage (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) and various articles on Greek comedy and its reception. Her current projects are a translation and commentary on Dimitrios Moschos’ comedy Neaira (15th century), and a comparative study of the emotional responses of audiences to Greek drama in Classical Antiquity and today.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.