Emotional Plot

The vocabularies of emotion are rich and pliable enough to make translation not only a matter of language but culture. Two main strands of scholarship in the study of fear downplays this cultural aspect in different manners: strictly lexical studies risks sorting “an extremely pliable, context-dependent term” into assumptions stained by the values and vocabularies of our own times, living as citizens of modern states; exclusively physiological accounts, such as Darwin, fixates on the “basic emotions” that cross-cultural comparison has undermined. Thus, with a non-(or not strictly)lexical approach, I compare the manner in which fear is presented in Homer’s the Iliad, Virgil’s the Aeneid, and Macbeth. In this episode, I argue that fear in these three works is likewise a power judgment: an estimate of one’s standing against another’s, which, in David Konstan’s reading of Aristotle, “encourages a careful calculation of the balance of forces”. 

In this episode, Michelle Zhang from the University of Pennsylvania joins us to explore the cultural anxieties surrounding female with a focus on Greco-Roman literature. By examining the archetypal figures of Medusa, the Sirens, and Medea (remember, most of the monsters you can thinking are female!), we explore how classical narratives simultaneously reveal and criminalize female potency. Misogyny, after-all, is usually a form of fear :p