Toppling the Hero: Polyphony in the Tragic City

"Toppling the Hero" considers contemporary uses of the term "tragic," as well as the philosophical tradition concerning tragedy. Page duBois argues that the earliest theorist of tragedy, Aristotle, wrote belatedly, from a post-classical perspective on the democratic city and its political/religious rituals, and began a long tradition of misreading fifth-century tragedy, focusing on management of the individual through tragic catharsis in a new kind of state. DuBois considers subsequent readings of tragedy that place the tragic individual at its center, including those of Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Judith Butler. Recent work by classicists on Greek tragedy reveals a genre that precedes and overwhelms familiar and comfortable postAristotelian models of genre, subjectivity, and psychology. DuBois argues that Greek tragedy ecstatically exceeds the tragic hero in its haunting by the slaves of ancient Greek society, in its access to mourning, and in its choral song that is of necessity collective, diverse, and heterogeneous.