Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era.
Menander's romantic comedies—which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love—are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city.
In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system.
Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

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zlib/Arts/Performing Arts/Susan Lape/Reproducing Athens: Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City_1267186.pdf

Lape, Susan

Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology

United States, United States of America

Princeton, NJ, United States, 2004

Princeton, N.J, New Jersey, 2004

Princeton, N.J, cop. 2004

November 24, 2003

PS, 2003

lg829448

{"last_page":294}

Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-278) and indexes.

Contents......Page 7
Abbreviations......Page 11
Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy......Page 19
The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot......Page 31
Comedy’s Constitutive Political Silence......Page 35
Constituting Citizens: The Laws of Genre and State......Page 37
Comedy’s Poetics of Political Membership......Page 39
Opposites Attract: Rape, Romance, and Democratic Selection......Page 42
The Power of Love: Female Selection and Male Education......Page 48
Reproduction and Resistance......Page 51
The Reproducibility of Athenian Democracy......Page 58
The Policies and Politics of Demetrius of Phaleron: Law, Power, and Prior Restraint......Page 61
Athens and the Antigonids: The Failed Foundation of Hellenistic Democracy......Page 70
“Romantic” Resistance: Comedy and the Sterility of Empire......Page 77
Gender and Democratic Identity......Page 86
The Importance of Acting Athenian......Page 90
Engendering Egalitarianism......Page 92
The Politics of Seduction......Page 101
Passionate Protagonists and Practical Citizens......Page 109
The Comic Romance Narrative: Marrying Interest and Necessity......Page 114
Staging a Biopolitics of Democratic Citizenship......Page 117
Democratic Reproduction in the Aspis......Page 124
The Politics of Love at First Sight......Page 128
The Democratic Logic of the Comic Plot......Page 131
The Class Politics of Sexual Conduct......Page 133
Performing Egalitarianism......Page 139
Ethical Identity and the Democratization of Social Relations......Page 141
Marriage Exchange and the Critique of Ideology......Page 147
Egalitarianism and Inclusion......Page 152
The Father-Son Romance......Page 155
Forensic Theater: Staging Comedy as Court......Page 159
The Consequences of Nonconjugal Cohabitation......Page 165
Demeas’s Defense: Revising the Tragic Family Plot......Page 168
Shame, Poverty, and Anger: The Politics of Affect......Page 174
The Work of Prostitutes: The Importance of a Gender Stereotype......Page 177
The Fragility of Manhood......Page 185
Socializing the Mercenary Lover......Page 189
Power and Punishment: Problems in the Perikeiromenē......Page 191
Learning the Language of Law: The Embedded Drama of Civic Education......Page 198
Gender and International Relations......Page 201
The Return of the Repressed: Gender and the Constraints of Genre......Page 204
Negotiations of Martial and Marital Values in the Misoumenos......Page 206
The Conquering Captive: Genre and Gender Inversion......Page 210
Civic Reciprocity and the Revision of Epic Manhood......Page 212
Ethics and Comedy’s Construction of Transnational or Hellenic Citizenship......Page 216
The Loss of the Citizen-Soldier Ideal......Page 220
The Macedonian Question and Athenian Civic Identity......Page 224
The Moral Manliness of the Democratic Man......Page 230
Menander’s Sikyōnioi: The Male Recognition Plot......Page 233
Ideology and Intertextuality......Page 238
Moschion’s Revealing Complexion......Page 240
The Lastauros: An Anti-Macedonian Tradition?......Page 245
Stratophanes’ Embodied Biography......Page 249
Metadrama and the Illusion of Identity......Page 252
Remasculinizing and Reproducing the Democratic State......Page 255
8. Conclusion: Inevitable Reproduction?......Page 261
Bibliography......Page 273
Acknowledgments......Page 297
Index Locorum......Page 299
C......Page 305
D......Page 306
H......Page 307
L......Page 308
N......Page 309
R......Page 310
W......Page 311
Z......Page 312

"Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era."--Jacket.

Athenian history between the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C. and the end of the Chremonidean War in 260 is punctuated by one military disaster after another.

2012-03-17