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This chapter examines the extent, range, and limits of comic self-reflexivity, which has recently been considered under the term ‘metatheatre’. The logical contradictions of such self-reference are situated alongside other forms of comic impossibility, and presented not as a form of distancing but as a form of audience involvement and intensification, in a dialogue with other empirical forms of comic impossibility, in which a fictional but grotesque baseline is maintained. Comic self-reference, despite its impossibility, acts as a tether for the audience. Even in less obviously metatheatrical plays (Clouds, Lysistrata, Ecclesiazousai), spikes in comic self-reference are shown to be narrative intensifiers and variations in the extent of self-reference are related to specific, often gendered, ideological demands.

This chapter attempts, on the basis of certain anomalies in the agon of the surviving (incompletely revised) version of Aristophanes' Clouds, to reconstruct the agon of the original (staged) version and the history of the revision. It is argued that in the original play (which was a failure) Strepsiades had not been present during the debate between the Superior and Inferior Logoi; that Aristophanes felt that the failure had been partly due to insufficient cause having been provided for the disaster which subsequently befalls Strepsiades; and that he therefore, in the revision, made Strepsiades hear all about the immorality of the Inferior Logos and then, with full knowledge, put Pheidippides into his hands. When revision was abandoned, however, some final adjustments to the script had yet to be made.

This chapter discusses several comedies created by Eupolis and provides necessary details about those comedies. It begins by examining the dates when Eupolis accomplished some of his literary works. It then discusses that a chorus of Goats is part of the familiar tradition of animal choruses in Old Comedy. It examines the structure and content of this chorus. It evaluates the possible similarities between Aiges and Clouds. It also discusses what Eupolis' plays are all about and tries to give dates when these literary works were created. It discusses that a fragment of Eupolis' work may be about an anti-war comedy. It gives a discussion of the Autolykos — another comedy of Eupolis — and its two versions. It argues that the word Baptai, found only in reference to the chorus and title of the play, was created by Eupolis for this play. It also provides discussions on what the play is all about and the date it was created. It examines several literary fragments and concludes that it belongs to Demoi. It provides a tentative reconstruction of Demoi. It notes that Heilotes was probably Eupolis' first comedy but presents an argument that this comedy may not be his.

This chapter shows how Aristophanes created in Clouds a distinct ‘scientific discourse’, even though he does not make use of technical language as such. It argues that Aristophanes compensated for the absence of high-profile technical languages by substituting linguistic material taken from, or linked to, the tradition of Presocratic scientific poetry.

Given the prominent role of language in sophistic culture, it is not surprising that language in repeatedly thematized in Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds. Throughout the play, there are scenes in which Aristophanes highlights various innovative features of word formation and morphosyntax, so as to create a sophistic ‘atmosphere’. None of these features is exclusive to Clouds, an in some way Aristophanes’ treatment of them seems paradoxical. However, this is only an apparent paradox resulting from a historical situation in which something like a sophistic Zeitgeist influenced Attic Greek as a whole deeply enough to bring along linguistic innovations. While the comic poet preferentially and consciously introduced such innovative features into a comedy depicting the sophistic world, where their growth had originated, he also started using them, unconsciously and like every speaker of Attic, in other unmarked contexts. This chapter first presents and discusses the relevant data for each phenomenon separately. It argues that all of them are symptoms of one general evolutionary trend in classical Attic Greek. It shows that Aristophanes’ impressionistic presentation of these features as ‘sophistic’ agrees well with a typological explanation of the general trend, and that the roots of the trend must be sought in the cultural revolution which Athens witnessed in the second half of the 5th century.

This chapter treats Aristophanes’s depiction of Socrates in Clouds, focusing in particular on Socrates’s use of mockery. It argues that the play depicts an anxiety concerning the threat Socrates poses to the operation of a democratic notion of authority in classical Athens. Drawing on the work of Josiah Ober and Danielle Allen, as well as on the contemporary theoretical treatment of authority by Jeffrey Stout, a notion of democratic authority is sketched that emphasizes the authorization each democratic citizen possesses to hold his or her fellow citizens to account. It is then argued that the Socratic mockery on display in Clouds subverts this notion of democratic authority by ridiculing those who do not possess Socrates’s intellectual sophistication as unfit to hold him accountable. It is this notion of superiority, coupled with a mockery of his intellectual inferiors, which Strepsiades learns from Socrates and deploys against his creditors.

This chapter shows an ominous side to the finale of Wasps: the false, quasi-tragic liberation of Cratinus’s mode, usually interpreted as genuinely comic. The chapter starts with the account of Philocleon’s disastrous performance at an aristocratic symposium and violent arrival onstage, exploring how his misuse of Aesop exposes Cratinus’s generic errancy. In the final scene, the dance contest between Philocleon and a mediocre tragedian’s sons suggests a paradoxical assimilation of Cratinean comedy to tragedy. Amid a complex of alignments involving Aristophanic comedy, Aesopic fable, iambos, and tragedy, the mad father Philocleon’s enthrallment to the ragged affect of Cratinean comedy (in opposition to the Aristophanic and Aesopic) demonstrates the failure of his son Bdelycleon’s—and Aristophanes’—rehabilitative efforts. Yet after the rejection of the therapeutic binding of the first Clouds, the unhappy ending awaiting the audience as well as Philocleon portends a grim future for the momentarily triumphant Cratinean mode—a literary-critical demotion in a contest of aesthetics. Productive of a discourse of generic affect, Aristophanes’ narrative of failure will make the father’s (and audience’s) rejection a mere setback on the path to a canonical embrace.

This chapter suggests that the revised Clouds (419–417 BCE) extends the narrative of the failure of the first version in 423 by deploying against the rival Eupolis the same delegitimating strategies used in Wasps against Cratinus. The chapter starts by considering how Aristophanes appropriates Electra’s defense of paternal authority to transform the conflict of comic modes in Wasps into opposing types of filial relationship: the child committed to avenging a wronged father versus the spoiled son who brings only ruin. The chapter also draws out affinities between Eupolis and Socrates, the anti-paternal teacher.The revised Clouds seems to depict an audience that the bad son Eupolis has deprived of Aristophanes’ protective cloak—just as Socrates steals the cloak of the comic father Strepsiades. Read through the intratextuality of parabasis and plot, Strepsiades’ destruction of Socrates’ school suggests the audience’s revenge for this loss, a turning of the implied violence of vulgar comedy against its practitioners in an incendiary moment of redemptive recognition that anticipates Aristophanes’ eventual supremacy in the comic canon.

Starting with a literary anecdote from Aelian that tellingly rewrites the audience response to Aristophanes’ defeated Clouds in 423 BCE, the chapter introduces the book’s overarching concerns: dramatic reception, the canon, and aesthetics—the character (including psychological and even physical effects) of the connection between play and audience, or more precisely how it is constructed. The discussion begins with the payoff of this construction, namely critical elevation culminating in canonical hegemony, before laying out the methodology, grounded in intratextual and intertextual readings, by which Aristophanes’ aesthetic discourse may be discerned. The chapter concludes with a preliminary examination of this aesthetic discourse, showing how Knights previews themes of the narrative mapped out in Wasps and the second Clouds.

This chapter argues that the father-son battle of Wasps grounds the sense experience of dramatic reception in the materiality of textiles by reimagining the defeat of Clouds in423 as a choice between Cratinus’s threadbare, deceptively liberating cloak (the tribōn) and Aristophanes’ thick, capacious formal wrap (the chlaina). While the tribōn exposes the play’s wandering father to cold and fevers, the chlaina offered by his son promises the warm, soft texture of a garment with protective and curative force—the affective quality imputed to the performance of the first Clouds. Based on multiple intratextual connections of parabasis and plot, this analysis helps gauge the essential, paradoxical role that Wasps’ narrative of failure plays in granting Aristophanes supremacy in the ancient comic canon.

This chapter reads the prologue of Aristophanes’ Wasps against Euripides’ Hippolytus—and later scenes involving the mad father Philocleon against the melancholic antics of Niobe and Bellerophon, two other characters from tragedy. Through these intertextual connections, the comic audience’s impure judgment in rejecting Clouds is attributed to the tragic psychology of Cratinus’s plays. While, through mimesis, Cratinean comedy’s ragged affective force, which has a textile analogue in Philocleon’s rough tribô‎n, estranges spectators from home and thus themselves, the warm Aristophanic chlaina, like the protective structure of home, does the opposite. Through this textile and architectural imagery, the paternal son Bdelycleon’s efforts to heal the tragic emotions of his father take on a canonical effect of closure, suggesting emotional, narrative, and generic binding.

This chapter considers Show Boat in the post-World War II era by way of the 1946 Broadway revival and two film versions made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood (extended excerpts in Till the Clouds Roll By and the 1951 Technicolor version). The Broadway production remade two black dance numbers by featuring black concert dancers Pearl Primus and LaVerne French. These changes benefitted the careers of a generation of black dancers, including Alvin Ailey. MGM underemphasized the show's black content, using “Ol' Man River” to feature Frank Sinatra and reshaping the role of Julie around screen goddess Ava Gardner. The 1951 film remains the most drastic revision of the show, truncating its historical reach and eliminating black performance as a central element of the story.

Attic (Athenian) comedy is particularly useful for the study of homosexuality in virtue of its characteristic explicitness in sexual matters. Moreover, it provides insight into what may have been prevailing popular attitudes toward the practice. Attic comedy is generally divided into three phases: Old (486–400 B.C.E.), Middle (400–325 B.C.E.), and New (after 325 B.C.E.). The most complete description of traditional man-boy pederasty comes in Clouds. Comparatively little has been written concerning homosexuality in Greek comedy. Fragments from Knights, Clouds, Wasps, Birds, Thesmophoria Women, Frogs, Wealth, Triple Phallus, The All-Seeing Ones, The Dippers, Spittle, Kitchen or All-Night Revel, The Mede, Sappho, Sleep, Helen, Phaedrus, Dithyramb, Odysseus, Fisherwoman, and Theseus are presented.

This chapter offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Froude’s fictional writings of the later 1840s: Shadows of the Clouds (1847) and The Nemesis of Faith (1849). Critically dismantling the view that they were merely fictionalized confessions, it supplies an entirely different context for a rereading which lies in the considerable body of critical work (all of it now neglected) which preceded and accompanied his literary experiments—notably, his studies of Spinoza, Goethe, and Tieck, and his several reviews for the Oxford and Cambridge Review. Arising from this a thematic analysis of Froude’s fiction is supplied, following his own critical technique, which emphasizes its audacious experimentation with multiple and undependable narratives, shifting time sequences and alternative endings, and its even more bold confrontation of the problem of individual moral responsibility in regard to natural sexual desire.

Cloud computing is an enabling technology for automation and abstraction. This places it in a unique position to effect paradigm shifts related to your work, society, and life. This chapter discusses some emerging technologies and trends related to cloud computing; they are the catalysts of change for the future technology landscape. Some of these trends, as with predictions in general, may not all come to pass. Nevertheless, extrapolations are made to consider the future outlook in terms of the following: Internet of Things and Services; Cloud of Things and Services; Personal Clouds; Cloud Service Exchange.

Fleming joined United Artists and shot its first major picture. Soon after, he developed a friendship with Theodore Reed, who often worked with Fairbanks. In 1919, Fleming made his directorial debut with When the Clouds Roll By, a comedy with fantasy and adventure elements that starred Fairbanks. This chapter gives a detailed summary and analysis of that film. Kathleen Clifford was the female lead, and she and Fleming had a four-year relationship. Fleming’s next movie, The Mollycoddle (1920), which also starred Fairbanks, is also discussed here at length. Fleming’s technical mastery of film and good professional relationship with his actors soon made him a sought after director.

This chapter compares the cloud-borne ascent of Jesus in Luke with the similar ascent and deification of Romulus. Two strategies of increasing the realism of ascent stories were available to ancient writers: one could, like Cicero, argue for the historicality of bodily ascent because it occurred in a cultured era when history was faithfully recorded. Alternatively, one could rationalize the ascent by saying that only the soul or mind was translated. In either strategy, certain theological commitments—especially that the gods can bend reality—were factors shaping what ancients could and did believe.