Professor Felix Budelmann: List of publications

<p>The chapter draws on the psychological as well as everyday notion of ‘attention’ to analyse the experience afforded by tragic messenger speeches. What marks out this experience, it is argued, is that attention shifts dynamically between not just two levels (the world of the play and the performance qua performance) but three: the offstage world of the messenger’s narrative, the messenger and his listeners onstage, and the performance qua performance. An awareness of this dynamic, it is suggested, can be detected in the iconography of messenger scenes on fourth-century pots. Euripides’ Andromache and Medea as well as Sophocles’ Electra serve as case studies for analysing the textual means by which the dramatists prompt ever-shifting patterns of attention, stimulating immersion in the narrative as well as drawing attention to the interactions occurring onstage. The chapter ends by looking to the psychology of attention to ask whether audiences are able to attend simultaneously to different levels or whether different objects of attention are in competition.</p>

Fiction, whether in the form of storytelling or plays, has a particular attraction for us: we repeatedly return to it and are willing to invest money and time in doing so. Why this is so is an evolutionary enigma that has been surprisingly underexplored. We hypothesize that emotionally arousing drama, in particular, triggers the same neurobiological mechanism (the endorphin system, reflected in increased pain thresholds) that underpins anthropoid primate and human social bonding. We show that, compared to subjects who watch an emotionally neutral film, subjects who watch an emotionally arousing film have increased pain thresholds and an increased sense of group bonding.

This article revisits the issue of female choruses in Classical Athens and aims to provide an alternative to the common pessimistic view that emphasizes the restriction of female choreia by the gender ideology of the democracy. We agree that Athens did not have the kind of female choral culture that is documented for Sparta or Argos, but a review of the evidence suggests that women did dance regularly both in the city itself and elsewhere in Attica, although not at the ideologically most marked occasions such as the City Dionysia. The latter part of the article turns from actual choruses to their representation in textual and iconographic sources. An important reason why modern scholarship sometimes underestimates the extent of female choreia in Athens, we suggest, is that Athenian sources are often purposefully elusive in their representation of female choruses.