GAGNÉ, R., and M. GOVERS HOPMAN, (eds.),
Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016. 1st paperback ed. IX,429p. Paperback. 'Multiple, multifarious, shifting, of many voices and one, authorial and spectator, attentive and vocal, omnipresent and kinetic: the dramatic chorus is an ineluctable draw for contemporary interpreters of ancient Greek drama. Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy, edited by Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman and part-product of a conference at Northwestern in 2009, offers a new wealth of kaleidoscopic readings on this so-called mediator. We are given the term “choral mediation” and told by Gagné and Hopman that it “encompass[es] all the mimetic transfers that allow different levels of reference to interact and complete each other” (2). So this is a theory not about a particular form of meaning but about the interstices between forms of meaning; it is capacious, almost infinitely so, although also exclusive in its way. In reading the chorus as a translator between various practices and representations, this method largely omits interpretations that advance the chorus as an aesthetic experience in and of itself. Nonetheless, the elasticity of this approach allows the book to offer sixteen diverse but uniformly rich essays that show how the chorus is a mediating figure for scholarly interests as much as it was a figure of shifting meanings on the Athenian stage for its inventors, performers, and observers.' (SARAH NOOTER in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.10.50).
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