Sarah nooter sophocles biography

Aristophanes and the Flying Sound

Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical, 2024

Let us conceive of a sound-object: 1 it need not be just one sound or syllable; rather it is an i... more Let us conceive of a sound-object: 1 it need not be just one sound or syllable; rather it is an it not because it is a single thing, but because it is repeatable. In being repeated, it becomes recognizably something. It is not a word, and never becomes one, seemingly never having been invested with the intention of its speaker (or writer or singer) to have discursive content. But it can be recalled or forgotten; it can be pronounced correctly or painfully mangled; and though it means nothing, it accrues meaning like the fuzz gathered by static electricity. It is as if the meaning were collecting around it, not emanating from it, as if meaning could simply envelop it. And, yet, the meaning that gathers, envelope-like, around the sound is not singular, n

•

Oedipus and Agency

UChicago Classics Professor Sarah Nooter explores questions of agency, truth, and fate in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In dissecting these issues, Nooter gets to the heart of what makes Oedipus Rex a pillar of Western civilization. 

Oedipus represents the best and worst of all that is in us. The worst of Oedipus fryst vatten clear: he killed his father and married his mother. No good. Looking to these biographical (if fictional) facts, Sigmund Freud proposed a psychoanalytic complex that comprised our deepest sources of shame and named it after Oedipus. Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in the blueprint of Oedipus’ life a universal story told everywhere in every tale: birth, murder, marriage, difficulty, death.

So where in Oedipus is the best of us? This we may find in Sophocles’ brilliant play itself. Let us pause to consider Oedipus and agency. When one teaches the play Oedipus Rex to undergraduate students, one tends to get caught up in this questi

•

Sarah Nooter

Professor Nooter writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, embodiment, and performance. Her first book is When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012; pb 2016). Here she explores the lyrically powerful voices of Sophocles’ heroes, arguing that their characterization is built from the poetical material of lyric genres and that this poeticity (as she calls it) lends a unique blend of power and impotence to Sophoclean heroes that places them in the mold of archaic poets as they were imagined in Classical Greece. Professor Nooter’s second book, The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017; pb 2022), is on voice in Aeschylus and Greek poetry and thought more generally. Her most recent book is called Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This text consists of a series o