Thinking with Tragedy: the Ancient and Renaissance Genres and their Influences

Catalog description

This course will explore the nature and influence of the Greek tragic theater in generating theatrical forms that enabled writers in later periods to dramatize tragedy's central philosophical and theoretical questions, and to theorize drama itself. The state theater of ancient Athens developed a dramatic form -- tragedy -- that formalized a space for exploring the complex relations of kinship, eros, gender, the polis, thought and desire. Yet tragedy was never without its others: the satyr play, comedy, philosophy. This course grounds itself in ancient Greek tragedy and pursues its afterlives and aftershocks in the early modern and modern periods, in drama, philosophy, and film. Throughout, we will attend to historical situation, rhetorical resources, genre as category, and questions of the mediation of the tragic in later periods. As a space for our own speculations about the intersections of theory and drama, the course will include readings from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine and Beckett, and will give some attention to modern film interpretations of works by these playwrights; theoretical readings may include Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Brecht, Vernant, Loraux, Derrida, Agamben, and Butler.