Angeliki Spyropoulou

Angeliki Spiropoulou (BA Athens; MA; PhD Sussex) is Associate Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University; and Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, where she convenes the Seminar Series ‘Comparative Modernisms’.. Her research focuses on European Literature; Critical Theory; Gender, Culture, History;  Modernism/Modernity; and Literature, Theatre and the Arts.

She has authored the monograph, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Palgrave-Macmillan 2010), and co-authored History of European Literature 18^th-20thC (Hellenic Open University 2008). She has edited the volumes: Walter Benjamin; Culture Agonistes, 
Contemporary Greek Fiction; and an issue on ‘Gender Resistance’ for EJES. She has recently contributed to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism; the Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism; and the volumes, Sentencing Orlando (Edinburgh University Press) and 1922: History, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press). Board Member of the refereed journals Theatre Polis; and European Journal of Comparative Literature and Regional Managing Editor for Greece forTheTheatreTimes.com

THEORY WORKSHOP

Oedipus’ Enigma

The theoretical workshop will focus on Sophocles’ plays Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. More particularly, it will raise the questions of the polis and citizenship apropos these plays which themselves offer a special version of the Oedipus myth, that is, a theatrical version. The issue of citizenship will be discussed in the light of classic interpretations of Oedipus by anthropology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, which contribute to the actuality of the plays in modern times and address the enigma of his guilt.

*Participants are expected to have read both plays and to have prepared for discussion on what they find enigmatic about the plays in question.