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Course Description

Summary

The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world? In this course, we will investigate these and other philosophical questions in the context of tragic drama from Greek antiquity of the 4th -5th c. BCE. We will consider marginalized social identities and intersectional readings, with attention to gender, queerness, and race/ethnicity in Greek tragedy and its receptions. We will engage with views on the meaning and significance of tragedy. We will read the Oreisteia and Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, the Theban Cycle (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) and Philoctetes by Sophocles, and Medea, The Trojan Women, and the Bacchae by Euripides. Likely secondary readings will include work by: Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Martha Nussbaum, and Emily Greenwood.