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162 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY Hall, Edith, et al., eds. 2004. Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millenium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hannaway, Craig. 2014. Review of Honig: Antigone, Interrupted. http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu /2014/2014-02-39.html (accessed 16/03/14). Hardwick,Lorna.2013.“The Problem of the Spectators:Ancient and Modern.”In Dialogues with the Past 1: Classical Reception Theory and Practice, ed. Anastasia Bakogianni, 126–21, BICS Supp. 126–1. London: BICS. Honig, Bonnie. 2013.“The Optimistic Agonist.” Interview with Nick Pearce, Open Democracy . www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic -agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig (Accessed 12/03/14). Kennedy, D. F. 2010.“Aristotle’s Metaphor.” In Derrida and Antiquity, ed. Miriam Leonard, 267–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lianeri, Alexandra. 2014. “A Syncretic Antiquity in Translation.” In Re-Imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, ed. Dimitris Tziovas, 59–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martindale, Charles. 2013. “Reception—A New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical.” Classical Receptions Journal 5:169–83. Mee, E. M., and Foley, H. P., eds. 2011. Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oswald, Alice. 2013. Memorial. London: Faber. Suter, Ann, ed. 2008. Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erika Fischer-Lichte. Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World. Blackwell-Bristol Lectures on Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. xvii + 238 pp. 12 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $60. As Erika Fischer-Lichte points out in these Blackwell Bristol Lectures on Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition, theatre practitioners, Classicists, and theoreticians rediscovered Euripides’ The Bacchae in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She identifies this development as a product of globalization and of a liminal historical period (1968–2008) in which communities were fragmented, earlier cultural identities were undermined, and encounters between cultures and classes played a new role. For the first time in the post-Classical West, a growing number of productions of The Bacchae began to appear on both Western and non-Western stages in response to complex political and social transitions. On the theoretical side, Fischer-Lichte singles out the importance for the interpretation of The Bacchae of Walter Burkert’s view of the role played by sacrifice in the origins of Greek tragedy and René Girard’s theory of “sacrificial crisis.” On the literary side, Jan Kott’s 1974 The Eating of the Gods expanded on anthropological studies in his interpretation of the play. She divides her study into three groups of theatrical performances.The first group celebrated the democratic god Dionysus as liberating to a community; the second group aimed to destabilize the cultural identity of the spectators; and the third “performed a productive encounter or destructive clash of cultures” (22). Overall, Fischer-Lichte argues 163 BOOK REVIEWS that any performance of the play cannot capture the original and must perform a sacrifice or sparagmos of the text (21). Part I focuses on three performances celebrating the liberating aspects of the god: Richard Schechner’s path-breaking and influential Dionysus in 69 by The Performance Group in New York from June 1968 to July 1969; the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, first performed by London’s National Theatre in 1973; and Teat(r)o Oficina’s 1996 Bacantes, staged by José Celso Martinez Correa (known as Zé Celso) in São Paulo, Brazil. The much-discussed Dionysus in 69 aimed at shared ecstasy and a cultural revolution. In an imitation of “oral tradition,” the production interwove Euripides’ text with script from the performers, who themselves changed roles throughout the run.The performance centered on an opening birth ritual for the god by nude actors and closed with a death ritual for Pentheus finally dominated by Dionysus, whose performance took on increasingly overt political overtones as the production wore on. The audience was invited to participate in various scenes. Following Stefan Brecht, Fischer-Lichte questions whether the production came closer to manipulating than liberating its audience. Soyinka’s also muchstudied play reinterpreted The Bacchae throughYoruban myth and ritual.Among many novel features...

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