EGL 098 - Tragedy

Course Units: 1.0

(Not Offered this Academic Year) Tragedy is an ancient Greek dramatic art that in its first forms and their later permutations has profoundly shaped the thinking of the western world. Tragedy meditates on the power of the gods, justice and injustice, order and chaos, fate and freedom, and the whole spectrum of human existence.

The first great tragic playwright, Aeschylus, affirms the painful, yet hopeful notion that wisdom comes through suffering; but less than two generations later the plays of Euripides offer much more pain than hope, and the wisdom gained from the tragedies of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (e.g., Shakespeare) tends to be extremely bitter. Tragedy in the 19^th and 20^th century gets bleaker still, as writers lose faith in both the existence of traditional heroes and any sort of cosmic justice–the very possibility of reconciling oneself with the world as it is. But, despite this dark vision, modern as well as ancient tragedy can also generate a powerful kind of pleasure in audiences and readers - just one of the many paradoxes built into the genre. This course will attempt to make sense of it all. CC: HUL, HUM Note: This course is open to all students but does not count toward an English major/minor/ID.