Barbara Goff – författare

Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a compendious, timely, and fascinating study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. It consists of detailed readings of six dramas and one epic poem, from different locations across the African diaspora. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson ask why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle figure so prominently among the tragedies adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedipus and the regressive obsession of Antigone, can articulate the postcolonial moment. Capitalizing on classical reception studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature, Crossroads in the Black Aegean co-ordinates theory and theatre. It crucially investigates how the plays engage with the 'Western canon', and shows how they use their self-consciously literary status to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and that of the Greek originals, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission.

Greek tragedy has held sway over the imagination of audiences for well over two millennia. This collection of essays on Athenian drama, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, demonstrates that Greek tragedy still retains its power to provoke debate and to engage the interest of specialists and non-classicists alike.The book includes essays by seven of the foremost scholars of Greek drama-Helene Foley, Michelle Gellrich, Peter W. Rose, David Rosenbloom, Richard Seaford, Bernd Seidensticker, and Froma I. Zeitlin. These writers explore the work of all three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and approach them from a variety of perspectives on history and theory, including poststructuralism and Marxism. They investigate the possibilities for coordinating theoretically informed readings of tragedy with a renewed attention to the pressure of material history within those texts. The collection thus represents a response within classics to "New Historicism" and the debates it has generated within related literary disciplines.

Geopolitical shifts and economic shocks, from the Early Modern period to the 21st century, are frequently represented in terms of classical antecedents. In this book, an international team of contributors - working across the disciplines of Classics, History, Politics, and English - addresses a range of revolutionary transformations, in England, America, France, Haiti, Greece, Italy, Russia, Germany, and a recently globalised world, all of which were accorded the classical treatment.The chapters investigate discrete cases of classicising crisis, while the Introduction highlights patterns among them. The book asks: are classical equations a prized ideal, when evidence warrants, or linkages forced by an implacable will to power, or good faith attempts to make sense of events otherwise bafflingly unfamiliar and dangerous? Finally, do the events thus classicised retain, even increase, their power to disturb and energise, or are they ultimately contained?Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire is essential reading for students and scholars of classics, classical reception, and political thought in Europe and the Americas.

What activities did the women of ancient Greece perform in the sphere of ritual, and what were the meanings of such activities for them and their culture? By offering answers to these questions, this study aims to recover and reconstruct an important dimension of the lived experience of ancient Greek women. A comprehensive and sophisticated investigation of the ritual roles of women in ancient Greece, it draws on a wide range of evidence from across the Greek world, including literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and vase-paintings, to assemble a portrait of women as religious and cultural agents, despite the ideals of seclusion within the home and exclusion from public arenas that we know restricted their lives. As she builds a picture of the extent and diversity of women's ritual activity, Barbara Goff shows that they were entrusted with some of the most important processes by which the community guaranteed its welfare.She examines the ways in which women's ritual activity addressed issues of sexuality and civic participation, showing that ritual could offer women genuinely alternative roles and identities even while it worked to produce wives and mothers who functioned well in this male-dominated society. Moving to more speculative analysis, she discusses the possibility of a women's subculture focused on ritual and investigates the significance of ritual in women's poetry and vase-paintings that depict women. She also includes a substantial exploration of the representation of women as ritual agents in fifth-century Athenian drama.

This 1990 book is a reading of Euripides' Hippolytos, a central play for the study of Euripides and of Greek tragedy. Dr Goff approaches the play through the techniques of modern literary criticism, including deconstruction and feminism, and is able to shed light on this influential text through her close examination of the language of the play. She divides her discussion into five important critical issues: gender, desire, violence, language and the status of poetry and drama. Throughout she is concerned to site the play in the historical and cultural context of fifth-century Athens, and her analysis of the position of women is particularly illuminating for the role of Phaedra, and for female characters throughout Greek tragedy. This is a provocative book which brings critical insights to one of the most extensively discussed of all Greek tragedies. It will be accessible both to classicists and students of drama and literary theory.

This 1990 book is a reading of Euripides' Hippolytos, a central play for the study of Euripides and of Greek tragedy. Dr Goff approaches the play through the techniques of modern literary criticism, including deconstruction and feminism, and is able to shed light on this influential text through her close examination of the language of the play. She divides her discussion into five important critical issues: gender, desire, violence, language and the status of poetry and drama. Throughout she is concerned to site the play in the historical and cultural context of fifth-century Athens, and her analysis of the position of women is particularly illuminating for the role of Phaedra, and for female characters throughout Greek tragedy. This is a provocative book which brings critical insights to one of the most extensively discussed of all Greek tragedies. It will be accessible both to classicists and students of drama and literary theory.

This collection of well-focussed essays is the first to examine explicitly the role played by the literature and culture of classical antiquity in the various discourses that established, maintained or undermined the British empire. Drawing on reception studies and postcolonial studies, the contributors investigate topics such as the intersections among nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of the Greek, Roman and British empires, the place of neo-classical poetry and classical education in the Caribbean, and adaptations of Greek drama by postcolonial writers in Africa and elsewhere. There is a substantial introduction that discusses the role of classics within the British empire, why it should compel our attention and how it might provide fruitful ground for further enquiry. The emphasis throughout is on the diverse ways in which the classical tradition has been used both by those who identified themselves with imperialist goals and by those engaged in struggle against imperialism.

Set at the end of the Trojan war, "Euripides' Trojan Women" depicts the women of Troy as they wait to be taken into slavery. While choral songs recall the death-throes of the great city, the scenes between the old queen, Hekabe, and the women of her family explore the consequences of the defeat, from the rape of Cassandra, through the triumphant self-exculpation of Helen, to the pitiful death of the child Astyanax, who is thrown from the walls of his ravaged city. Barbara Goff sets the play in its historical, dramatic and literary contexts, and provides a scene-by-scene analysis which brings out the pace and intellectual vigour of the play. The main themes are fully discussed, and the book also introduces readers to the issues that have divided critics, such as the extent to which the play responds to the historical events of the Peloponnesian War. The final chapter, which deals with the reception of the play, offers new insights into several modern works.

This book is the first to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?Thinking the Olympics brings together contributions from various disciplines, including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history. Together these perspectives foreground two opposing plots which recur and collide ritually on the occasion of the Games. On the one hand, the Games present themselves as an ideal enactment of pure, intrinsic Olympic values; on the other, the Games appear as a messy performance of extrinsic investments by diverse parties with their own interests, commercial and political. Power, money, property, and identity are persistently at stake in the Games. But in a time when credit and trust among nations are in short supply, the Olympic arena and its flexible traditions may be where exchange can be done.

Geopolitical shifts and economic shocks, from the Early Modern period to the 21st century, are frequently represented in terms of classical antecedents. In this book, an international team of contributors - working across the disciplines of Classics, History, Politics, and English - addresses a range of revolutionary transformations, in England, America, France, Haiti, Greece, Italy, Russia, Germany, and a recently globalised world, all of which were accorded the classical treatment.The chapters investigate discrete cases of classicising crisis, while the Introduction highlights patterns among them. The book asks: are classical equations a prized ideal, when evidence warrants, or linkages forced by an implacable will to power, or good faith attempts to make sense of events otherwise bafflingly unfamiliar and dangerous? Finally, do the events thus classicised retain, even increase, their power to disturb and energise, or are they ultimately contained?Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire is essential reading for students and scholars of classics, classical reception, and political thought in Europe and the Americas.

This book is the first to examine the complex and contradictory history of Classics in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria. It investigates how Classical Studies, as an integral part of colonial education, enforced a notion of cultural inferiority on African subjects, but conversely played an enabling role in nationalist expression. The enquiry is structured around three main questions: how Classics contributed to the formation of a new class of Europeanising West Africans in the late 19th century; how Classics was implicated in the ideological struggles of the early twentieth century over the desirability of 'practical' or 'agricultural' education; and how the uses of Classics changed in the years leading up to independence.