This Friday (10/25) at 3:30 p.m. in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum will host Nancy Worman, professor of classics at Barnard College. Dr. Worman is affiliated with Barnard’s Program in Comparative Literature and Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and has published numerous books and articles, including Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge 2015), Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury 2019), and Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury 2021), which won the 2022 PROSE Award for Classics. Her talk will explore how Antigone is positioned – physically, emotionally, and ideologically – in the different settings of Sophocles’ Antigone, Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas, and Athol Fugard’s The Island.
How do we make sense of the character of Antigone? This talk explores how Antigone is positioned – physically, emotionally, and ideologically – in the different settings of Sophocles’ Antigone, Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas, and Athol Fugard’s The Island. Always a figure of rebellion, Antigone is embodied by each writer in distinctly meaningful ways. While Sophocles stages her resistance to Creon as physically isolated, Woolf deploys her outsider status to depict female embodiments and attitudes that challenge the status quo. Fugard and his collaborators take up Antigone as a means of highlighting the contrasting perspectives of the incarcerated rebels who stage a very succinct revision of Sophocles’ play. Thus all three writers, including the ancient dramatist, find in Antigone a stance that joins political resistance to unconventional and uncompromising deportments.
Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard College and affiliated with Barnard’s Program in Comparative Literature and Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on style and the body in performance in classical Greek drama and its reception, as well as rhetoric and ancient and modern literary criticism and theory. She has published books and articles on these topics, including Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge 2015), Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury 2019), and Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury 2021), which won the 2022 PROSE Award for Classics. Her current research is focused on embodiment in ancient and modern literary theory and feminist receptions of ancient literature, including a forthcoming book entitled Bodies of Theory.
