Peter Meineck - Böcker

Theatrocracy is a book about the power of the theatre, how it can affect the people who experience it, and the societies within which it is embedded. It takes as its model the earliest theatrical form we possess complete plays from, the classical Greek theatre of the fifth century BCE, and offers a new approach to understanding how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural, and political force, inspiring and being influenced by revolutionary developments in political engagement and citizen discourse. Key performative elements of Greek theatre are analyzed from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as embodied, live, enacted events, with new approaches to narrative, space, masks, movement, music, words, emotions, and empathy. This groundbreaking study combines research from the fields of the affective sciences – the study of human emotions – including cognitive theory, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, and cognitive archaeology, with classical, theatre, and performance studies. This book revisits what Plato found so unsettling about drama – its ability to produce a theatrocracy, a "government" of spectators – and argues that this was not a negative but an essential element of Athenian theatre. It shows that Athenian drama provided a place of alterity where audiences were exposed to different viewpoints and radical perspectives. This perspective was, and is, vital in a freethinking democratic society where people are expected to vote on matters of state. In order to achieve this goal, the theatre offered a dissociative and absorbing experience that enhanced emotionality, deepened understanding, and promoted empathy. There was, and still is, an urgent imperative for theatre.

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world. Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.

What is catharsis and how exactly do pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) and other emotions achieve it? Rather than examining catharsis as described in Aristotle’s Poetics, this book instead places it within the context of performance in ancient Greece from the Palaeolithic to the fourth century BCE.Over the course of history, theorists and philosophers have explored catharsis using Aristotle as their starting point. Meineck takes a novel approach here; embedding Aristotle within the cathartic culture that was around him, the book traces how and why catharsis was enacted in ancient Greece, from the Palaeolithic period up until the fourth century BCE, placing it in its conceptual, religious, social and philosophical context. Over twelve chapters the performance of catharsis is explored in caves in the Palaeolithic, by Greek shamanistic healer prophet figures, in the lesser and great Eleusinian mysteries and their reflection in iambic and lyric poetry, within the Homeric epic tradition, via the worship of Dionysos, and in fifth and fourth century BCE drama. Rather than seeking to know what catharsis is, we may instead ask what catharsis does and how it was practiced.Performing Catharsis is suitable for students and scholars of the ancient world working on drama, philosophy, religion and medicine, as well as drama and performance practitioners. Readers in the health, wellbeing and medical humanities communities will also find much of interest.

What is catharsis and how exactly do pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) and other emotions achieve it? Rather than examining catharsis as described in Aristotle’s Poetics, this book instead places it within the context of performance in ancient Greece from the Palaeolithic to the fourth century BCE.Over the course of history, theorists and philosophers have explored catharsis using Aristotle as their starting point. Meineck takes a novel approach here; embedding Aristotle within the cathartic culture that was around him, the book traces how and why catharsis was enacted in ancient Greece, from the Palaeolithic period up until the fourth century BCE, placing it in its conceptual, religious, social and philosophical context. Over twelve chapters the performance of catharsis is explored in caves in the Palaeolithic, by Greek shamanistic healer prophet figures, in the lesser and great Eleusinian mysteries and their reflection in iambic and lyric poetry, within the Homeric epic tradition, via the worship of Dionysos, and in fifth and fourth century BCE drama. Rather than seeking to know what catharsis is, we may instead ask what catharsis does and how it was practiced.Performing Catharsis is suitable for students and scholars of the ancient world working on drama, philosophy, religion and medicine, as well as drama and performance practitioners. Readers in the health, wellbeing and medical humanities communities will also find much of interest.

Theatrocracy is a book about the power of the theatre, how it can affect the people who experience it, and the societies within which it is embedded. It takes as its model the earliest theatrical form we possess complete plays from, the classical Greek theatre of the fifth century BCE, and offers a new approach to understanding how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural, and political force, inspiring and being influenced by revolutionary developments in political engagement and citizen discourse. Key performative elements of Greek theatre are analyzed from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as embodied, live, enacted events, with new approaches to narrative, space, masks, movement, music, words, emotions, and empathy. This groundbreaking study combines research from the fields of the affective sciences – the study of human emotions – including cognitive theory, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, and cognitive archaeology, with classical, theatre, and performance studies. This book revisits what Plato found so unsettling about drama – its ability to produce a theatrocracy, a "government" of spectators – and argues that this was not a negative but an essential element of Athenian theatre. It shows that Athenian drama provided a place of alterity where audiences were exposed to different viewpoints and radical perspectives. This perspective was, and is, vital in a freethinking democratic society where people are expected to vote on matters of state. In order to achieve this goal, the theatre offered a dissociative and absorbing experience that enhanced emotionality, deepened understanding, and promoted empathy. There was, and still is, an urgent imperative for theatre.