Mario Telò

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both...

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals?

Telò boldly traces Aristophanes’s rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close...

“Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy may be the most sophisticated application of postmodern paradigms to Greek tragedy to date. This original and truly bold study will appeal to the cross-set of readers who are familiar with both Greek tragedy and postmodern theory.” —Mark Padilla

“Mario Telò’s book is one of the most astonishingly original, learned, and engaging pieces of Classical scholarship. It is truly a vanguard work on several different fronts. It is the kind of work that not only the field of Classics, but contemporary literary criticism in general, has...