The specific availability for this course is not currently known. If you would like to know if this course will be offered during your session, please contact us.
This course will examine the idea of tragedy from classical Greek times to the present. The approach or method will be structured around literary, historical and philosophical texts, as well as visual forms (architecture, sculpture, painting, graphic art). There is a substantial bibliography in the library (Nietzsche, Kauffmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, Stone, Sophocles and Racine, Goldmann, Le Dieu Caché, Ferguson, The Idea of a Theatre, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Warnke, Versions of Baroque, etc. The class readings will include Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Chapters 11 - 21 in the Gospel according to St. John. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Pascal, Pensées; Racine, Phèdre; Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Eliot, The Waste Land, Camus, The Stranger, Cavafy, Selected Poems, and possibly Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Duras, The Lover will also be available. The visual material will include the Parthenon, Romanesque sculpture and Chartres; the work of Michelangelo; Rembrandt, Goya, Géricault, Picasso. (The Christofides Commentary 2007 is one of your texts.) Aspects of the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be studied in the quest for redefinitions of the meaning of tragedy since Aristotelian times, in terms of changing cultural conditions and value systems.
The course will be adapted, partly, to the resources in Southern France (looking at Roman instead of Greek art, for instance, at Arles but Greek art in Paris or London for those students who invariably spend a weekend in Paris, Florence, or England.) Exhaustive visual material is available at the Institute, but original art will be viewed whenever possible. For literary texts obviously this is not a problem, and for the literature in translation I have developed a philological/linguistic system so that the students would acquire some comprehension of key words and concepts in ancient Greek, Latin, Old or modern French (the French literary texts will, of course, also be available in the original).
The course will therefore take a broad view of the cultural periods in which "tragedy" has appeared and will try to analyze the "tragic vision" in both aesthetic and philosophical ways.
There will be mid-term and final essay type examinations. The grade breakdown is as follows: mid-term exam: 30% final exam: 40% *Essay: 20% class & excursion participation: 10%
Format of the exams will be explained in class.
An individual conference with the instructor will be held before the mid-term in order to assess the student's progress and advise accordingly. *A five-page essay (not a research paper) will be due on the last day of classes, on a topic that especially interested you during the semester, ideally on a comparative basis. Art and creative writing students may contribute work, provided there is a page of narrative. More about this in class.
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