Greek Tragedy (Audiobook) | Date: 12 April 2011, 05:06
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Professor Elizabeth Vandiver explores fully 25 of the 32 surviving tragedies that the great Athenian playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have left to us.
Now two-and-a-half millennia old, ancient dramas such as Eumenides, Oedipus the King, and Trojan Women retain a compelling, almost incantatory power.
[b]Professor Vandiver observes early in the course:[/b]
"It is a notable paradox that Greek tragedy, a dramatic form that flourished for less than a full century, a dramatic form that began in a particular religious festival of a particular god some 2,500 years ago, remains vibrant, alive, and productive today.
"It seems that there is something about tragedy that lifts it out of its particular circumstances and beyond its particular gods, social issues, and political concerns to give a kind of universality that is, in the last analysis, very surprising."
These plays have attracted focus and reflection from Aristotle, Freud, Nietzsche, and others who look deeply into the human condition. The great tragedies shed light on the extraordinary time, place, and people that produced them.
And they may help us—as perhaps they helped their original audiences—to grasp a fuller sense of both the terror and wonder that life presents.
[b]A Rounded View of a Grand Art Form[/b]
Professor Vandiver has designed these lectures to give you a full overview of Greek tragedy, both in its original setting and as a lasting contribution to the artistic exploration of the human condition. There are three main points to the course:
[b]First: [/b]The Plays in Their Context. You learn to see Greek tragedy as a genre in its cultural context. Why did this powerful art form flower in the Athens of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War? What is tragedy's deeper historical background? Did it grow out of rituals honoring the god Dionysus, as is so often said? What role did it play in Athenian civic and religious life? How was it related to earlier performance traditions such as bardic recitation? How did Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides each make unique contributions to tragedy's expressive power?
[b]Second: [/b]The Plays on the Stage. Too often, the surviving tragedies are seen purely as texts to be read, rather than as scripts to be played. Hence the second aim of Dr. Vandiver's course is to teach what scholarship can reveal about the performance of tragedy, including its physical and ritual settings, actors and acting methods, conventions of staging and stagecraft, and even how productions were financed.
[b]Third: [/b]The Plays in Rich Detail. Third, you explore with Professor Vandiver a broad group of tragedies in close detail. In particular, you will ask how individual tragedies use traditional myths (often tales from the Trojan War), and what Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides intended to accomplish by changing or adding to the basic story. You examine what certain tragedies imply about the world of 5th-century Athens, and the importance, in turn, of the cultural background for explaining those tragedies.
[hide=Course Lecture Titles]
[list][*]1. Tragedy Defined
[*]2. Democracy, Culture, and Tragedy
[*]3. Roots of a Genre
[*]4. Production and Stagecraft
[*]5. Aeschylus—Creator of an Art Form
[*]6. The Oresteia—Mythic Background
[*]7. The Oresteia—Agamemnon
[*]8. The Oresteia—Libation Bearers and Eumenides
[*]9. A Master of Spectacle
[*]10. The Three Electras
[*]11. The Sophoclean Hero
[*]12. Antigone and Creon
[*]13. Oedipus the King, I
[*]14. Oedipus the King, II
[*]15. Two Tragedians, One Hero
[*]16. Greek Husband, Foreign Wife
[*]17. Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Aphrodite's Wrath
[*]18. Euripides on War and Women
[*]19. Euripides the Anti-Tragedian
[*]20. The Last Plays of Euripides
[*]21. Euripides and the Gods
[*]22. The Last Plays of Sophocles
[*]23. Other Tragedians and a Comedian
[*]24. The Tragic Legacy
[/list][/hide]
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