Charles Segal (NHC Fellow, 1993–94)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1993–94

Charles Segal devoted a major portion of his time to a commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses, books 10-12, and to a literary introduction to this five-volume work. He completed two other book-length projects, both collections of his previously published essays augmented by new material: Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Cornell University Press) and Sophocles' Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Harvard University Press). He also revised essays that will appear in forthcoming books: "Greek Man: Spectator and Listener" for Greek Man, edited by Jean-Pierre Vernant (University of Chicago Press); "Classical Criticism and the Canon; or, Why Read the Ancient Critics?" for Reading World Literature, edited by Sarah Lawall (University of Texas Press); "The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar's Twelfth Pythian Ode" for Embodied Voices: Female Vocality in Literature, Film, and Art, edited by Leslie C. Dunne and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge University Press); the introduction to Sophocles: The Theban Plays (Everyman's Library); and "Catharsis, Audience, and Closure in Greek Tragedy" for a volume edited by Michael Silk (Oxford University Press). Other essays which he wrote and/or revised during his fellowship year include: "Perseus and the Gorgon: Pindar, Pythian 12.9-12 Reconsidered" (American Journal of Philology); "The Chorus and the Gods in Oedipus Tyrannus' (Arion); "Female Mourning and Dionysiac Lament in Euripides' Bacchae" (for a festschrift for Helmut Flashar); a new introduction to the Italian edition of his book Lucretius on Death and Anxiety, originally published by Princeton University Press in 1989; "Chorus and Community in Euripides' Bacchae" (in the forthcoming proceedings of a conference honoring Bruno Gentili at the American Academy in Rome).