What do you think?
Rate this book
Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes
Described as "a powerful, brilliant, and original study" when first published, this second edition of Froma Zeitlin's experiment in decoding the Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes in the light of contemporary theory now updates her explorations of the tragic struggle between Eteocles and Polyneices, the doomed sons of Oedipus, with a new preface, a new afterword, and the addition of the relevant Greek texts. The mutual self-destruction of the enemy brothers in this last act of the cursed family is preceded (and determined) by one of Aeschylus' most daring innovations through the pairing of the shields of attackers and defenders in the central scene of the play as an extended dialogue explicitly concerned with visual and verbal symbols. In a preliminary consideration of the relations between language and kinship and between city and family, between self and society, as determining forces in fifth-century drama, the heart of the book is a detailed investigation of this tour de force of semiotic energy. Zeitlin's decipherment of this provocative text yields a heightened appreciation of Aeschylus' compositional artistry and the complexity of his worldview. At the same time, this study points the way to Zeitlin's larger engagement with the special ideological role that the city of Thebes comes to play on the tragic stage as the negative counterpart to the self-representation of Athens.
198 pages, Hardcover
First published March 28, 2009
8 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 26, 2015
I almost thought I would give this book 4 stars, but then at the end there's a discussion of the Greek conception of the self that is absolutely phenomenal and blew me away.
Definitely worth reading. Brilliant discussion of tragedy, language, meaning. Her analyses of Eteokles, Amphiaraos, and the play as a whole are all on point in really fascinating ways. At times the book does get a bit dry, but it only does so because its so replete with good interpretation.
Here's a quote about language:
"But even more, the specific nature of the language in question draws attention to language itself in its capacity to shift from one signifying level to another. We have here perhaps a lesson on figuration included as an integral element in establishing the physical and moral reality of the world that is founded on the victory of Zeus over Typho. What is perhaps most remarkable in the abstract vocabulary in this passage (tupos, antiptupos, schema, eidos, schesis, etc.) is that the emergence of the pictorial emblems into a typological function as verbal and visual signs is described in those very words which later will serve as technical terms in the elaborated systems of rhetoric and allegory. For now, this grand scheme at the fourth gate only implicitly suggests the interrelations of language, art, and reality as it reveals the triple function of the figure as corporeal form, artistic representation, and rhetorical trope in the context of establishing for the first time the formal category of the antithesis."
Here's one about Eteokles and selfhood:
"“Sophocles’ Oedipus is a character who has been described as a fully “public man.” Nevertheless, he is surrounded by all those who are nearest to him. These scenes of confrontation, in fact, deepen the tragedy by showing him a man whose relations are doomed to disaster because he does not know the basis of his own identity. The Seven, by contrast, shows the effects for a man who has refused identification with his own, whether they be false or true, and who from the beginning of the play has cut himself off, since he constitutes himself as “one,” a singular among the many. His relations with the world are restricted to the scout who does his bidding, to the anonymous collective of the women of the city, and to the distant view of the enemy through their shields and through the utterances of another. Does this mean that he has no one else with whom to interact? Does not the dramatic construction of the play perfectly reproduce the formal screen which he has erected between himself and all the others in the autonomy of his actions and in the abstract categories through which he views the world? Is not the peripeteia precisely the event that endows him with a self when he must confront his brother whose return from the past and from exile reconnects the history of the family line? The return of the family is the return of affect, the return of desire (himeros, eros), the return of relatedness. But now that kinship is acknowledged in terms of conflict and denial, and it poses at the end the paradox of the “family reunion” through its negation. Eteokles, we might say, seems to get exactly the play he deserves, one that replicates in its theatrical representation the very themes and issues of the play itself.”13
13. Rosenmeyer, 1963, 22, responding to Eteokles’ interest in the “tidy distinctions set up by the rational mind,” calls him a Platonist. In this light, it is tempting to correlate Eteokles’ involvement with spectacle and theater with Gouldner’s remarks on Plato’s dramaturgic view of life as exemplified in the dialogues. “This dramaturgic view of life is likely to develop…when men lack or lose historical moorings. As they lose a sense of their place in history, they come to feel themselves moving through a mere succession of situations, each linked to the other by sheer propinquity or by a surface symbolic consistency, rather than inwardly as cause and effect. The dramaturgic perspective on life sees it as lived in a narrow, interpersonal focus–as ahistorical and noninstitutional–as an existence beyond history and beyond society, as coming truly alive only in transient moments of face-to-face encounter.” What better description of the shield scene than this?"
Thank you, Ethanatos!
Definitely worth reading. Brilliant discussion of tragedy, language, meaning. Her analyses of Eteokles, Amphiaraos, and the play as a whole are all on point in really fascinating ways. At times the book does get a bit dry, but it only does so because its so replete with good interpretation.
Here's a quote about language:
"But even more, the specific nature of the language in question draws attention to language itself in its capacity to shift from one signifying level to another. We have here perhaps a lesson on figuration included as an integral element in establishing the physical and moral reality of the world that is founded on the victory of Zeus over Typho. What is perhaps most remarkable in the abstract vocabulary in this passage (tupos, antiptupos, schema, eidos, schesis, etc.) is that the emergence of the pictorial emblems into a typological function as verbal and visual signs is described in those very words which later will serve as technical terms in the elaborated systems of rhetoric and allegory. For now, this grand scheme at the fourth gate only implicitly suggests the interrelations of language, art, and reality as it reveals the triple function of the figure as corporeal form, artistic representation, and rhetorical trope in the context of establishing for the first time the formal category of the antithesis."
Here's one about Eteokles and selfhood:
"“Sophocles’ Oedipus is a character who has been described as a fully “public man.” Nevertheless, he is surrounded by all those who are nearest to him. These scenes of confrontation, in fact, deepen the tragedy by showing him a man whose relations are doomed to disaster because he does not know the basis of his own identity. The Seven, by contrast, shows the effects for a man who has refused identification with his own, whether they be false or true, and who from the beginning of the play has cut himself off, since he constitutes himself as “one,” a singular among the many. His relations with the world are restricted to the scout who does his bidding, to the anonymous collective of the women of the city, and to the distant view of the enemy through their shields and through the utterances of another. Does this mean that he has no one else with whom to interact? Does not the dramatic construction of the play perfectly reproduce the formal screen which he has erected between himself and all the others in the autonomy of his actions and in the abstract categories through which he views the world? Is not the peripeteia precisely the event that endows him with a self when he must confront his brother whose return from the past and from exile reconnects the history of the family line? The return of the family is the return of affect, the return of desire (himeros, eros), the return of relatedness. But now that kinship is acknowledged in terms of conflict and denial, and it poses at the end the paradox of the “family reunion” through its negation. Eteokles, we might say, seems to get exactly the play he deserves, one that replicates in its theatrical representation the very themes and issues of the play itself.”13
13. Rosenmeyer, 1963, 22, responding to Eteokles’ interest in the “tidy distinctions set up by the rational mind,” calls him a Platonist. In this light, it is tempting to correlate Eteokles’ involvement with spectacle and theater with Gouldner’s remarks on Plato’s dramaturgic view of life as exemplified in the dialogues. “This dramaturgic view of life is likely to develop…when men lack or lose historical moorings. As they lose a sense of their place in history, they come to feel themselves moving through a mere succession of situations, each linked to the other by sheer propinquity or by a surface symbolic consistency, rather than inwardly as cause and effect. The dramaturgic perspective on life sees it as lived in a narrow, interpersonal focus–as ahistorical and noninstitutional–as an existence beyond history and beyond society, as coming truly alive only in transient moments of face-to-face encounter.” What better description of the shield scene than this?"
Thank you, Ethanatos!
Displaying 1 of 1 review