Emmanuela Bakola

I am currently holding a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and pursuing my project Aeschylean Tragedy and Early Environmental Discourse. With this project I seek to demonstrate that a rich strand of Greek literature is profoundly preoccupied with humanity's relationship to the earth and its resources. I focus mainly on the tragedy of Aeschylus, and offer a close (re-)reading of the plays by applying an interdisciplinary framework informed by spatial criticism, cultural anthropology, and classical scholarship. I seek to show that the tragedy of Aeschylus explores the relationship of man to the earth through its use of space, imagery, and engagement with religion and ritual. Although the relationship of man and earth has a metaphysical character, in Aeschylus it is mainly reflected upon through economic concepts (production, consumption, waste) and is connected to socio-political issues which in all times are linked to environmental concerns, especially gender, hegemony and justice.

 

While working on a monograph entitled The Erinyes and the Wealth of the Earth, I am seeking to demonstrate certain core concepts of my project in separate articles: In ‘Interiority, the ‘deep earth’, and the spatial symbolism of Darius’ apparition in the Persians of Aeschylus’ (CCJ 2014) I demonstrate that the use of an interior space (the skene) is an essential part of the play’s construction of the ‘earth’ on the theatrical stage. I also show the connections between ground space, deep (underground and interior) spaces, natural imagery and extra-scenic spaces, and why they suggest a holistic understanding of the concept ‘earth’. In ‘Textile symbolism and the ‘wealth of the earth’: creation, production and destruction in the ‘tapestry scene’ of Aeschylus’ Oresteia’ (forthcoming in Spinning the Fates), I argue that textiles and the processes of their production (especially weaving and dyeing with murex) have a symbolism which makes them indispensable for our understanding of the salient issues of the ‘tapestry scene’: wealth, life, and their creation, destruction and waste. In a chapter which explores the engagement of Cratinus with the Oresteia and the Aeschylean Erinyes in particular (‘Crime and Punishment’), I argue that Aeschylus’ preoccupation with the idea of the earth was well known to his contemporaries. I am also revising a piece which explores the symbolism of the ‘house’ and other interior spaces in the Oresteia in connection to the deep earth and its productive and destructive powers, titled ‘The oikos in the Oresteia and the origins of eco-logical discourse’.

 

In  the context of the same project, I also organised the public workshop Greek Theatre, Landscape and Environment (February 2014). 

 

Comedy as a source of reception of other poetry was the main focus of my research for several years (and led me to my current project). In 2010 I published a monograph on the major Athenian comic poet and older rival of Aristophanes, Cratinus (Cratinus and the Art of Comedy), a large part of which focused on comedy’s dialogues with other genres. I have also published articles on comedy, archaic lyric and ancient literary criticism, comedy and satyr play, etc. A volume entitled Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres, which contains the proceedings of an international conference which I organised with L. Prauscello and M. Telo, was published by CUP in 2013.