Melissa Mueller - Objects As Actors

This book is the product of a long period of reflection on objects in Greek tragedy. It is a pleasure to thank here the colleagues and friends who offered support and guidance over many years, and to acknowledge the institutions that enabled the books completion. A residential fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, in 200910, gave me the time and the courage to envision the project anew. Im grateful to CHS director Gregory Nagy and the senior fellows for making the resources of the Center available to me and to my cohort of fellow researchers for their stimulating conversation and camaraderie. The College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, generously provided the supplementary funding that made my stay in DC possible.

Individual chapters of this book have been read and judiciously critiqued by Joshua Billings, John Gibert, Justina Gregory, Mark Griffith, Debbie Felton, Donald Mastronarde, Alex Purves, Antonia Syson, and Oliver Taplin. Im also indebted to the anonymous readers of two previously published articles: Athens in a Basket: Naming, Objects, and Identity in Euripides Ion, which appeared in Arethusa (43:365402) in 2010, and Phaedras Defixio: Scripting Sophrosune in Euripides Hippolytus, which appeared in Classical Antiquity (30:14877) in 2011. I acknowledge with gratitude the permission granted by the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of California Press to include portions of these articles in chapters , respectively.

Audiences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Toronto, the American University of Paris, Brandeis University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Leiden University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Smith College, and Yale University heard early versions of several chapters, and provided valuable feedback.

Conversations and correspondence with Roberto Alejandro, Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, Emily Baragwanath, Yelena Baraz, Lilah Grace Canevaro, Andrs Fabin Henao Castro, Francis Dunn, Petra Kalshoven, Andromache Karanika, Naomi Rood, Tyler Rowland, Seth Schein, Janine Solberg, Barry Spence, and Antonia Syson renewed my enthusiasm and nuanced my thinking at critical junctures. My classics colleagues at UMass-Amherst were patient with me as months of revisions stretched into years. And Maria Bulzacchelli and Debbie Felton made Amherst into a home away from home during much of that time.

My writing has benefited immensely from the interventions and incisive comments of six readers who critiqued drafts of the manuscript in its entirety, at various stages. Egbert Bakker sharpened the analysis, style, and structure of the whole; Helene Foley wisely urged me to rethink and rewrite the Oresteia chapter; Leslie Kurke helped me see where the theatrical and the political intersected; Laura McClure encouraged me to simplify and to summarize; Mario Tel introduced me to the affective turn, significantly expanding my sense of what objects can do, while Donald Mastronarde made many improvements to both the style and substance of a penultimate draft. I also wish to thank Reader B, one of the three readers chosen by the University of Chicago Press, for a set of comments that challenged me to deepen my engagement with theater and performance studies. Im especially grateful to Susan Bielstein for seeing the projects potential at an early stage, and for expertly shepherding it through the review process at the Press. Id also like to thank James Whitman Toftness for his help in securing permissions and preparing the manuscript for production and Kathryn Krug for her excellent copyediting. All errors and infelicities are, of course, my own.

I have been wonderfully lucky in having had teachers who were as generous as they were exacting. Here I single out three who have significantly shaped this work. Helene Foley, Leslie Kurke, and Donald Mastronarde not only provided inspirational models for how to read tragedy, but also acted as daimones ek ponn epargoisteering me safely to shore on more than one occasion. I have been fortunate also in my friends. Larry Kim and Sira Schulz, Dylan Sailor, and Jolle Tamraz have sustained me for more years than I care to count, reminding me of what really matters. No words can capture what I owe Egbert Bakker, who has had to live with a work in progress for far too long. I thank him for reminding me to look to the end, and for showing me the way. I dedicate Objects as Actors to my parents, Alfred and Julia Mueller, who have waited forty years for the thesis to become a book.