KJCKorea
Journal Central

Theatre studies has long centered human agents, marginalizing the nonhuman entities that co-produce dramatic events. This paper renders visible material agency and human-nonhuman entanglements in drama, drawing on new materialism and posthumanism. Using Donna Haraway’s cyborg and sympoiesis and Jane Bennett’s thing-power, assemblage, and distributed agency, it analyzes Corneille’s La Conquête de la Toison d’or and Euripides’ Medea. In La Conquête de la Toison d’or, the Golden Fleece functions as a material node assembling human and nonhuman forces, while the theatrical machine drives and redirects the dramatic action. In Medea, Medea is read as a hybrid subject traversing the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and the material objects surrounding her are traced as co-producers of catastrophe. Medea’s appearance aboard the mēchanē is interpreted as the emergence of homo ex machina, a figure in which the human and nonhuman apparatus converge. This study extends posthumanist theatre studies to classical texts and proposes homo ex machina as an analytical concept for rethinking theatrical figures in which the human, the mechanical, and the divine converge.