IDS 2230 - Greek Tragedy

Credits: 4
The dramatic form we know as ‘Greek Tragedy’ was created in a unique historical and cultural context. In classical Athens in the fifth century BCE, tragic playwrights like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides presented powerful spectacles of human suffering centered upon the heroes and heroines of myth and legend: Agamemnon and Oedipus, Orestes and Electra, Medea and Antigone. These plays have also had an enormous influence throughout history, not only on drama but also on literature and the arts, on the history of ideas, and on our very notion of ‘the tragic.’ This course will study both Greek tragedy and its modern legacy, with attention to the plays in their original setting as well as the ways in which artists, writers and thinkers have used them as a resource in the modern and post-modern era-for art, theatre and fiction; philosophy and psychology; political thought and feminist theory. And we will consider whether the idea of tragedy has any value in a post-modern world.