In 2017, I finished my PhD in ancient Greek literature, about the relationship between memory – individual, collective and cultural – and the formation of political societies. I explored the ways in which represented remembering and forgetting in the Odyssey, Euripides’ Trojan Women and Plato’s Theatetus, forged political communities and allegiances both in the world of the texts and in the worlds of the audiences or readers.
Since finishing the PhD, I have been teaching English, the subject of my undergraduate studies. I love it but I miss writing and I miss the Greeks! Sometimes, while I’m discussing texts with classes, ideas for essays start to evolve. In summer 2020, after a hard term of online teaching, I couldn’t keep them in any longer and had a couple of articles accepted by the English and Media Centre’s Emagazine, one on The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and its reception of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and one on Hamlet and Euripides’ Hecuba. These should be published in the December issue this year. While this is very exciting, I don’t feel that I could or should keep on bombarding them with my thoughts, so started ruminating on this blog…
So what can you expect if you choose to come back? My plan is (sporadically) to upload short essays on whatever text(s) happen to be obsessing me at the time. The first in the pipeline is on traumatic memory in Lady Macbeth and Euripides’ Hecuba, drawing (lightly) on the theory in my thesis; I hope that will be up soon, depending on how this week’s reports go… These essays will be designed to be useful extension reading for A Level English Literature pupils (and teachers) but I hope that they will also be substantial enough to feed into the wider academic discussions of these texts and ideas.
If you’re a glutton for punishment and think my PhD thesis might be up your street, you can read it here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/53658/13/Raudnitz%20-%20Thesis.pdf
Tragic Geek 