Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Clark, Maribeth

Area of Concentration

Humanities

Abstract

The primary goal of this piece is to establish the figure of Tiresias as a character that has made a profound impact on artistic and literary minds over the course of millennia. It aims to draw parallels between the anxieties of particular time periods and the anxieties embodied by the character of Tiresias himself, proving his existence as a reflection of proto-transgender attitudes in Ancient Greece, demonstrating how these attitudes have carried into works including Tiresias in both the twentieth and twenty-first century while postulating the ways in which the character could be utilized by poets, playwrights, and musicians alike in the coming years. This piece moves chronologically in its’ exploration of Tiresias: beginning with Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Ovid in antiquity, moving into the early twentieth century with Apollinaire, finding footing with Eliot, and Poulenc in the postmodern era, and finally settling into the present where the unknown lies ahead of us.

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