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Project Overview

This website publishes results obtained by experimentally applying a new technique of literary study to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The results come in the form of approximately 1,050 focused studies, called “mappings.”

The experiment tests several related hypotheses.

  • Literary works argue–they affect the audience’s disposition to decide what action to take under certain circumstances.
  • The argument develops in the audience’s mind in response to prompts occurring at fixed places within the text or performance.
  • Response is predictable; the prompt provides impetus and direction while the context provides constraints.
  • The argument is fragmented; its terms and premises are distributed across numerous passages of response answering to prompts found throughout the work.
  • Each mapped response contains at least one element of the argument; a term or even a premise.
  • From a set of mappings the argument can be discerned.
  • Once articulated, the argument serves as a basis for inferences about the historic audience.

In addition to the set of mappings, the website includes texts of the play in the original Greek* and an English translation.** In both texts each of the 1,050 prompts is marked with a hyperlink that leads to the corresponding mapping. A second set of hyperlinks allows the user to jump from any place in one version of the play to the corresponding place in the other. A third set of hyperlinks connects discrete terms identified in the mappings to elements on a Table of Rubrics that presents the argument’s terms, definitions, and premises in the form of an outline. A hyperlink at each rubric on this table takes the user either to a definition of the term or to all instances of that term’s identification throughout the mappings.

A guide to the mappings is available in the form of a printed User’s Guide that explains the foundational hypotheses and details the five-step procedure for identifying prompts, mapping response, identifying terms, reconstructing the argument, and making historiographic inferences. One chapter of the User’s Guide is devoted to elaborating each of these by presenting and discussing sample mappings of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

 

*  The Greek text is the 1912 edition by Francis Storr provided in digitized format by The Perseus Digital Library; many thanks to Alison Babeu, Digital Librarian.

** Translation by Victor Udwin.