The Art of Tragedy and the Tragedy of Life
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Among the innumerable achievements of the ancient Greeks, the invention and celebration of tragedy (the genre, the form, the metre, the stage, the music, the action, the metaphysics) is inarguably one of its foremost, and to some inexplicable, cultural wonders. Exactly what sorts of social, cultural, political, and environmental conditions powered the Greek (or Attic) tragedy remain to this day a hotly contested question. Its origin notwithstanding, what is incontestable is that tragedy, in both its ancient and moder incarnates, has always afforded an effective, at times dangerous, medium for the negotiation of endurin problems about justice, theodicy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and meaning. All human are born to suffer, but how is that suffering borne – and by whom – is the concern of tragedy. To properly ground ourselves in the study of this dramatic form, we will first familiarise ourselves with Aristotle’s analysis and definition of tragedy in his seminal piece of literary theory, Poetics. Together with Joan Tronto’s ethics of care, we will peruse five select plays from two undisputed masters of ancient Greek drama, Sophocles and Euripides. Through their representations of extreme human suffering (violence, rape, mutilation, enslavement, bereavement, silencing, etc.), we will uncover the art of characterisation, dissect the use of dramatic devices, assess competing tracks of argumentation, and most importantly, plumb the depths of human nature. Following the term-long survey of Greek plays, we will then turn our attention to the brief yet explosive flowering of tragedy in the Elizabethan Age (from 1585 to 1625). Influenced by the Senecan tragedies of first-century Rome and the revenge tragedies of the late sixteenth century, William Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, brought murder, revenge, dismemberment, insanity, and suicide directly to the stage. His late tragedies, especially, exemplify an energetic synthesis of the Aristotelian paradigm of Classical theatre and the non-Aristotelian deviations of Elizabethan drama, fraught with dazzling spectacles, antiheroic protagonists, and comic reliefs. For the remainder of this unit, we will look at three of Shakespeare’s mature and late tragedies, Hamlet (1599- 1602), King Lear (1605-1606), and Coriolanus (1605-1608). Crucially, as we navigate these artistic “semblances” of human suffering, we will confront and re-evaluate our own attitude toward life – be it pessimism or optimism, negation or affirmation, barrenness or abundance. Given the philosophical scope of tragedy both as a genre of literature and as a condition of life, we will complement our study with dithyrambic meditations from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872/1886) and Christopher Hamilton’s A Philosophy of Tragedy (2016).
READING TEXTS:
I. Primary
Fall 2019- Spring 2020 Sr.
Aristotle. Poetics, translated by Anthony Kenny, Oxford UP, 2013. (ISBN 978-0-19-960836-2) [NOTE: read pp. 17-40]
Euripides. The Trojan Women and Other Plays, translated and edited by James Morwood, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-953881-2) [NOTE: read Trojan Women and Hecuba]
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin Books, 2005. (Provided)
Hamilton, Christopher. A Philosophy of Tragedy, Reaktion Books, 2016. (Provided)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated and edited by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999. (ISBN 978-0-521-63987-3)
Plato. The Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-953576-7) [NOTE: read Chapter 13]
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by G. R. Hibbard, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-953581-1)
— King Lear, edited by R. A. Foakes, Bloomsbury, 2016. (ISBN 978-1-9034-3659-2)
— Coriolanus, edited by R. B. Parker, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-953580-4)
Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra, translated by H. D. F. Kitto, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-953717-4)
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Routledge, 1993. (Provided)
II. Secondary
Allan, William. “Tragedy and the Early Greek Philosophical Tradition.” A Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by Justina Gregory, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 71-82. (Provided)
Croally, Neil. “Tragedy’s Teaching.” A Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by Justina Gregory, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 55-70. (Provided)
Griffith, Mark. “Authority Figures.” A Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by Justina Gregory, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 333-351. (Provided)