Whatever is true . . . is neither one nor even reducible to one.-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to PowerIt was fate, really, that led me to question Oedipus's guilt. Time after time, my main obstacle in teaching Sophocles's Oedipus the King was my students' pre-packaged conviction that the play was only a drama of fate with perhaps a dash of hubris. They believed that what happened to Oedipus happened because it was cruelly fated, and that in the end the play could mean little more than what Oedipus himself reckons about his destined lot: "It was Apollo, friends, Apollo, / that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion."1There was little reason, in these students' minds, to read the text all that carefully, and certainly not much cause to fuss over details. After all, it was "obvious" that Oedipus unwittingly murdered his father, King Laius of Thebes, at a crossroads. And because he married the king's widow, Oedipus also wed his own mother, fulfilling the double fate of parricide and incest foretold to him at Apollonian Delphi. At the drama's climax, convinced of his guilt Oedipus blinds himself; his queen, Jocasta, already persuaded of the awful truth, has hanged herself in despair. In short, the evidence "convinces every character in the play-not to mention virtually every reader or viewer since it was first produced-that Oedipus did indeed kill his father and marry his mother" (Blundell 1992, 300-1). Destiny won.Resisting fate, a teacher could argue that Oedipus's present actions in the play are free rather than determined and therefore worth scrutinizing in themselves.2 Yet some students will not unreasonably respond that undiscovered crimes are no less crimes, and that Oedipus's actions simply amount to discovering what fate (as Apollo) already held in store. Yes, they'll say, he perhaps could have chosen not to investigate the old king's murder, probable source of Thebes's plague, and have lived on in happy albeit plague-ridden ignorance. But then, they'll predictably conclude, his happiness would simply be that of not knowing that he had fulfilled his horrible destiny. The instructor might then try, as I did, to challenge such predetermined reading by linking the play to the Oedipus complex,3 or by historicizing the tragedy's expressions of religious doubt and sacred vs. secular struggles. For that matter, a teacher could shiftthe focus to the myth's moral, literary, or cultural functions, enlisting Aristotle's Poetics or Claude Levi-Strauss's prismatic Structural Anthropology to illuminate the play's genre, structure, or purpose. But it nonetheless proved impossible for me to unsettle my students' steadfast convictions about the tragedy's too-simple meaning of wretched destiny and resigned forbearance. Sphinx-like, fate blocked the way, posing no riddle other than how a teacher like me could guide or goad students to read the play more closely and invite the unexpected.In a sense, then, it was fate that prompted me to try to erode the foundations of such facile interpretations of Oedipus the King. And I did so by raising doubts about Oedipus's actual guilt. I don't mean that I generated doubt merely by calling attention to his ignorance of his own actions or to the divinely stacked deck of cards dealt him at birth. Rather, I tried to get students to raise doubts about whether Oedipus had murdered his father at all. Perhaps I had in the back of my mind Voltaire's pointed criticisms about the play's flaws of verisimilitude. I certainly was prodded along by J. Hillis Miller's observation that "Oedipus convicts himself by putting the somewhat ambiguous evidence together in a way that convicts him" (1990, 78). Before I'd discovered several other skeptical studies, including Frederic Ahl's conspiracy- inflected Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction, I had only an inkling about how much of the evidence for Oedipus's guilt was in fact ambiguous.4 But those first steps led me all the same to discover a way for my students to undermine their firm convictions about Oedipus's guilt and its fatal cause: by requiring them to vigorously defend their ancient client, mirroring the play's own emphasis upon evidence, testimony, and judgment. …

The Murderers of Laius, Again (Soph. "OT" 106-7)

Oedipus Crux:Reasonable Doubt in Oedipus the King

Es dificil conocer la retorica griega en sus origenes, puesto que los primeros manuales teoricos al respecto se han perdido. Asi pues, es necesario abordar esa cuestion de manera indirecta, por ejemplo, a traves del influjo del nuevo arte en otros generos literarios. 
En esta tesis se estudia la configuracion retorica de las rheseis o discursos contenidos en las tragedias de Sofocles, que abarcan un periodo muy significativo en el desarrollo retorico (la segunda mitad del s. V a.C.). El analisis se centra especialmente en las tragedias de epoca temprana, por ser estas, dentro de la produccion sofoclea, las mas cercanas al nacimiento de la retorica. El trabajo engloba basicamente tres puntos:
1) Argumentacion. Su estudio nos permite conocer como se desarrolla el pensamiento y se busca la persuasion en un momento temprano del desarrollo de la retorica como techne. Ademas, al comparar esa argumentacion con la que se desarrolla en el Sofocles tardio, apreciamos la evolucion que tuvo lugar en ese momento clave.
2) Composicion de las rheseis. El nivel de desarrollo retorico de un discurso se percibe en sus argumentos pero tambien en su estilizacion formal; de ahi que la composicion del discurso, asi como la recurrencia en el a determinadas formulas para estructurar el pensamiento sean factores a tener en cuenta.
3) Conciencia retorica. Es de sumo interes ver como el uso de la retorica redunda en una reflexion creciente por parte del autor acerca de las caracteristicas de esta techne e incluso del logos en general, lo que lleva a una reflexion mas amplia sobre la comunicacion y los limites del conocimiento humano.
El analisis de estos tres campos en las tragedias sofocleas nos permite valorar el nivel de desarrollo de la retorica en un momento clave y, ademas, profundizar en el conocimiento de esas tragedias, en las que la retorica es un factor esencial en el planteamiento del conflicto y, por tanto, en la consecucion del fin dramatico, que en ultima instancia, por las propias caracteristicas del genero, es en buena medida una reflexion acerca de la sociedad en la que ese genero se desarrolla.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/tesis/1404.pdf

Tragedia y retórica en la Atenas clásica: la rhesis trágica como discurso formal en Sófocles

Débil "versus" fuerte: un argumento de "eikos" en Sófocles y sus implicaciones en la cuestión del asesino o asesinos de Layo

This article aims to demonstrate how sophocles uses the concept of hand (in greek χείρ, pronounced khe–r) and other body parts thematically throughout Oedipus Rex (OT ) and how this merges into oedipus’ investigation of the murder he committed himself. To illustrate the effect of this theme on the original audience’s experience of the drama, i substantiate my study with modern cognitive theories of memory, lexical salience and priming effect. Thus i hope to show how sophocles consciously plays with the spectator’s mind throughout the performance, in order to make way for a new imagery, hands, within the story of oedipus. iMagery rooted in the huMan body is quite frequently employed in attic tragedy and in sophocles in particular, although there is still no systematic study of this figurative element. This article is a small attempt to show how fascinating sophocles’ thematic use of individual body parts is. it goes without saying that the foot (πούς, ποδ-, ποσ-) in OT is a frequently appearing word1 since a popular etymology of the name Οἰδίπους means swollen foot (poignantly referred to in line 1036) and given that the sphinx’s riddle also referred to feet.2 foot has an immediate strong lexical salience in the mind of the audience,3 and thus one should not refuse, as dawe (1982) often does in his commentary, arguing from an aesthetic perspective, * i would like to thank the “anonymous referees” of the Logeion for their splendid comments and for improving my english. 1. at 130, 468, 479, 718, 877, 1032, 1034, and in compositions 128, 418, 445, 865, 1349. see e.g. segal (1993) 56–7; griffith (1996) 78–81 for a discussion on the importance of foot-imagery. The study of foot-imagery in OT by Cantenaccio (2012) supplements my reading of the hand-imagery. for a study of the deeper meaning of feet and movement in OT, see kicey (2014). 2. on oedipus’ name, see e.g. Vernant & Vidal-naquet (1990) 123–4; segal (1981) 207, 223. 3. goldhill (2012) 27–9 takes this salience for granted. so will i do, since it was known already in the fifth century that the riddle of the sphinx placed emphasis on feet; see the vase by the oedipus painter, museo gregoriano etrusco Vaticano, 16541.

/pdf/the-hand-of-oedipus-the-network-of-body-imagery-in-ot-4fu16vw38n.pdf

The Murderers of Laius, Again (Soph. "OT" 106-7)

Citations

Oedipus Crux:Reasonable Doubt in Oedipus the King

Tragedia y retórica en la Atenas clásica: la rhesis trágica como discurso formal en Sófocles

Débil "versus" fuerte: un argumento de "eikos" en Sófocles y sus implicaciones en la cuestión del asesino o asesinos de Layo

The hand of oedipus: the network of body imagery in ot.