@article{2013,title={ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY AND THE ECOLOGY OF CULTURE},abstractNode={In the mimetic sense, Ancient Greek tragedy appears as the most straightforward manifestation of human impetus, along with forming the spine of literary history. As Aristotle puts, catharsis becomes the fundamental device of tragedy that provides the possible grounds for transmitting this sense of purification, in that it arouses the feelings of pity, fear, importance or probability on the part of the spectator and the reader. Taking one work from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, this article aims at interpreting Ancient Greek Tragedy in the light of the theory “Literature as Cultural Ecology” which was introduced by German Ecocritic, Hubert Zapf in 2000. “Literature as cultural ecology” discusses the function of literature in the ecological balance of the universe. According to the triadic function model of Zapf, a work of imaginative literature embodies a cultural-critical metadiscourse describing the fallacies of the dominant ideological civilisatory system, an imaginative counter-discourse expressing the repressed and marginalised aspects of the so-called system, and a reintegrative inter-discourse attempting to reconcile the two poles by building a relationship between the aspects of civilisatory system and which remain outside of this hegemonic powers. The cultural-ecological function of literature is that it records every single instance and thus performs as the “conscience” of cultural history. In this sense, regarding nature and culture as complementary entities literature gains a holistic outlook contrary to the view of most cultural critics that claim that nature and culture are two opposing forces. Consequently, the common initiative in cultural studies that “everything is a construct” is eradicated through proposing a multi-layered perception of literature.},author={Funda CİVELEKOGLU},year={2013},journal={The Journal of Academic Social Science Studies}}