Event

Speaker: Erika L. Weiberg, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and Theater Studies at Duke University

Abstract: Euripides’ Helen dramatizes the trauma of survival after an Athenian military disaster that killed many soldiers abroad (the Sicilian Disaster). Far from being a simple melodrama of adventure and escape, the novel plot of Helen casts its protagonists, and particularly Helen, as survivors of losses that continue to haunt them, as well as of virulent stories that challenge their sense of their own memory and identity. Engaging with trauma theory, this talk traces this crisis of survival through formal tropes such as repetition, doubled scenes, and performances that re-enact past trauma. Helen shows how these repetitions and returns can function as ways of working through past trauma by changing the survivor’s relationship to their feelings of loss and to their community.