Syllabus Outline for Thinking with Tragedy: Ancient Genres and Their Influences
COLIT-GA 2821 (and POET-GA 2001 and ELEC-GG 2830) Wednesdays, 5:00-7:30 pm
Professors Laura Slatkin and Susanne Wofford
Fall, 2014
Laura Slatkin: office 505 in 1 Washington Place; office hours: Tu 2-3; W 4-5 and by
appointment. Ph: 212-998-7363; best way to reach me is by email: [email protected]
Susanne Wofford; office 802 in 1 Washington Place; office hours by appointment
Ph: 212-998-7367 and cell 347 436 5112. Email and texting is often the best way to reach
me. Please contact my assistant Emily Mansfield (212-992-7742) if you want an appointment
or email her at [email protected].
1. A term paper of about 20-25 pages due at the end of the semester. Please consult with us
on your topic.
2. One page of analysis/commentary (weekly response paper) prepared before class each
week on a topic from our reading, posted to the Forum on NYU classes for that week by
Tuesday evening at 6 pm.
3. All students will read the weekly responses from each other by class time.
4. Each student will lead the discussion and present a focused interpretation of an aspect
of our readings once during the semester—we will create a class calendar to organize
these presentations. These presentations should be no more than 15 minutes long and
be intended to open up a discussion. They should be presentations from notes possibly
including visuals presented on the screen not read essays. The discussion following the
presentation could be 10 minutes, so that the whole event would be no more than 25
minutes or so.
5. As this list suggests, active participation and regular attendance is a requirement of the
course. If you have to miss more than one class, we will consider that something must be
wrong, and will expect you to schedule an appointment to discuss your work.
6. You must be able to use the NYU Classes system in order to get the readings for this
class and to post your comments. Please also make sure that we have the email you
actually use as well as a working phone number for you. Auditors will have to be
formally entered into the NYU Classes site by our Assistant Emily Mansfield.
PLEASE NOTE: We plan to schedule two classes outside of the normal time. One is actually an
extra class which we hope you will make time for. The second is to make up the class that would
normally take place the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week—we assume that you will want to be
able to travel before Thanksgiving.
IN ADDITION, in an effort to really work you hard, we will ask you to try to make room for at
least two additional events. The first is that King Lear from the Globe Theater will be playing
at Skirball in late September and October, and we will get tickets for the class for you. IF you
cannot come when the class goes, we will ask you to try to go on your own.
In addition, Fiasco Theater Company, a professional theater company in residence at Gallatin,
will be presenting a staged reading of Antony and Cleopatra on Nov 12, and we would like you
to make every possible effort to arrange to see that reading.
The Gallatin Theater, run by Kristin Horton, is presenting a series of plays and performances in
November on the theme of the Roman Shakespeare. Kristin will be directing a performance of
Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece and a group of undergraduate actors will be presenting Julius
Caesar. We strongly encourage you to make time at least to see The Rape of Lucrece.
Schedule of Readings and Assignments:
Sept 3
Epic into Tragedy I
Homer, Iliad 1; Aeschylus, Oresteia.
Suggested background reading: Vernant, J.-P. and P. Vidal-Naquet,, “The
Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece
[translation of Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris:1972)] 23-28; Slatkin,
L. “Notes on Tragic Visualizing in the Iliad”, ch.1 in Visualizing the Tragic, edd.
C. Kraus, S. Goldhill, et al. (Oxford: 2007); Cartledge, P., “Deep Plays: theatre as
process in Greek civic life” in Easterling, P. ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: 1997) 3-35; Nussbaum, M. “Aeschylus and practical
conflict,” ch. 2 in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: 1986) 25-50
Sept 10
Tragedy as Aftermath
Sophocles, Electra; Euripides, Electra; Sartre, J-P., Les Mouches (The Flies).
Secondary reading: Bacon, H., “The Chorus in Greek Life and Drama”, Arion
3.1 (1994-95) 6-24; Goldhill, S., “The City of Words”, ch. 3 in Reading Greek
Tragedy (Cambridge: 1986) 57-78; Vernant, J.-P., “Tensions and Ambiguities in
Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (1972, 1988) 29-48.
Recommended reading: Vernant, J-P., “Intimations of the Will in Greek
Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA:1988) 4984; Goldhill, S., “Genre and Transgression,” ch. 10 in Reading Greek Tragedy
(Cambridge:1986) 244-264; Foley, H. “Sacrificial Virgins: the ethics of
lamentation in Sophocles’ Electra” Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton:
2001), 145-171.
Sept 17
Revenge redux/Tragedy as hyper-corporealization
Seneca, Thyestes; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus. (Ovid, Philomela.)
Secondary reading: Hammond, P. “The Work of Tragedy,” ch. 1 in The
Strangeness of Tragedy (Oxford:2009) 13-39; Enterline, L. selections from
Shakespeare’s Schoolroom.
Recommended reading: Rowe, K., “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus
Andronicus,” in Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern
(Stanford: 1999). Recommended viewing: Julie Taymor’s film Titus
James, H., “Blazoning Injustices: Mutilating Titus, Virgil and Rome,” ch. 2 in
Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge:
1997) 42-84.
Sept 24
Kingship, Kinship
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos (Oedipus the King); Aristotle, Poetics
Secondary reading: Dodds, E.R., “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex” in
Segal, E., ed., Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: 1989) 177-188.
Vernant, J-P., “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus
Rex” Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, 189-209.
Recommended reading: Freud, S. Interpretation of Dreams, selection on Oedipus
and Hamlet; Lezra, J., “Introduction: Terrible Ethics” in Wild Materialism: The
Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: 2010) esp. 6-12.
Oct 1
Shakespeare, King Lear
Secondary reading: Greenblatt, S. “Shakespeare and Exorcism” (1988); Cavell,
S. “The Avoidance of Love” in Must we mean what we say? (1969) (Selections);
Kozintsev, G., selections from King Lear: The Space of tragedy (Diary of a Film
Director)(Russian original 1973; translation 1977).
Recommended: Halpern, R. “Historica Passio: King Lear’s Fall into Feudalism,”
in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and
the Genealogy of Capital (1991); Freud, S. (1913). “The Theme of the Three
Caskets.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud vol. XII (1911-1913): 289-302.
Thursday October 2: One possible visit to the Globe Production of Lear in
Skirball with Laura
Oct 8
Bare Life and Tragic Form
King Lear; Beckett, Endgame
Secondary reading: Agamben G, Homo Sacer (selections)
Kott, J., “King Lear or Endgame,” from Shakespeare our Contemporary (1964)
Recommended reading: Lezra, J. “The Logic of Sovereignty,”ch. 3, in Wild
Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: 2010) 88-
99; Recommended viewing: Peter Brook, King Lear; Kurosawa, Ran; Kozintsev,
King Lear.
Thursday Oct 9: Second possible visit to King Lear at Skirball with Susanne
Oct 15
Tragic internalization/Internalization as tragedy
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Secondary reading: Pollard, T., “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare? Renaissance
Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 1060-1093; Pollard, T., “Greek
playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England”; Derrida, J. Specters
of Marx (selections on the ghost as revenant); Garber, M. Shakespeare’s
Ghostwriters (Selections from Hamlet Chapter); Mack, M. “The World of
Hamlet”.
Recommended reading: Greenblatt, S., Hamlet in Purgatory (selections); Henke,
R., “Virtuosity and Mimesis in the Commedia Dell Arte and Hamlet” in Italian
Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. M.Marrapodi;
Pollard, T., “Conceiving Tragedy”.
Extra Class/ party to be scheduled sometime in this period to discuss Sulayman
Al Bassam, The Al Hamlet Summit
Recommended reading: Selections from Margaret Litvin, Hamlet's Arab Journey:
Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost.
Comments and essays on The Al Hamlet Summit:
http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/blog/2013/07/26/al-hamlet-summit-intro/
Oct 22
Tragic metatheater, tragic modernity
Euripides, Bacchae
Secondary reading: Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); Foley, H. “The
Bacchae,” ch.5 in Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca: 1985)
205-258; Easterling, P. “A Show for Dionysus” in The Cambridge Companion to
Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: 1997) 36-53.
Oct 29
Rotating desire/tragic thresholds
Euripides, Hippolytus; Racine, Phèdre.
Secondary reading: Burian, P. “Myth into muthos: the shaping of tragic plot”, in
Easterling, P. ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997) 178-208;
Barthes, R. On Racine, translation by R. Howard (New York: 1964) of Sur Racine
(Paris: 1960), selections.
Nov 5
From Tragedy to Pastoral/ From Pastoral to Tragedy
Euripides, Cyclops; Tasso, Aminta; Theocritus Idyll 1; Idyll 11
Recommended reading: Tylus, J. “Cult, Cultus and the work of Local Culture:
Interpreting Ancient Patoral” in On Interpretation: Studies in Culture, Law, and
the Sacred, edd. Weiner, A. D. and L. V. Kaplan; Tylus, J. “Purloined Passages:
Giraldi, Tasso and the Pastoral Debates” MLN 99, no. 1, (Jan. 1984), 101-124.
JSTOR.
Nov 12:
Euripides, Alcestis; Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale. Recommend: review Much Ado
about Nothing. Suggested: Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuna (1619); Ovid,
Pygmalion
Secondary reading: Foley, H. “Anodos Dramas: Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen”,
ch. IV in Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: 2001) 303-338; Enterline, L.,
"You Speak a Language that I Understand Not": The Rhetoric of Animation in
The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1. (Spring, 1997)17-44.
(JSTOR) or version in her book “The Rhetoric of Animation in The WT” in The
Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: 2004)
Recommended reading: Henke, R., Pastoral Transformations: Italian
Tragicomedy and Shakespeare's Late Plays (Selections); Bishop, T., “The
Winter’s Tale or Filling up the graves” in Shakespeare and the Theater of Wonder
(Cambridge: 1996); Clubb, L., “Pastoral Jazz from the Writ to the Liberty,”
in Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed.
Michele Marrapodi (Aldershot: 2007)
Evening of November 12 Fiasco Theater Reading of Antony and Cleopatra
Nov 19
Epic and Tragedy II: tragic eros
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Plutarch Life of Marc Antony. (Selections
from Plutarch Of Isis and Osiris); The Tragedie of Antonie, by Robert Garnier,
translated by Mary Herbert (Sidney), the Countess of Pembroke (1595)
Secondary reading: Cavafy, “The God Abandons Antony”; Wofford, S.
“Antony’s Egyptian Bacchanals: Heroic and Divine Impersonation in Plutarch
and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra”; Adelman, J., The Common Liar
(1973) (Selections)
Recommended reading: Adelman, J. “Antony’s Bounty” in Suffocating Mothers;
James, H., “The Politics of Display and the Anamorphic Subjects of Antony
and Cleopatra.” Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Late Tragedies, ed. Susanne
Wofford; Hodgdon, B. “Doing the Egyptian” (partly on Tree’s 1906 production
and on 20th century images and movies)
Nov 26
Class to be rescheduled -- topic will be continuing the discussion of Antony and
Cleopatra and Aeneid Books 1, 2 and 4
Dec 3
Tragic Civitas
Shakespeare, Coriolanus; Cervantes, Numancia (1583)
Secondary reading: Michael Armstrong-Roche, “The Patria Beseiged: Border
Crossing Paradoxes of National Identity in Cervantes’s Numancia” in Border
Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers, edd. Vizcaya, B. and Simon
Doubleday (2008)
Recommended reading: Cavell, S., “Who does the wolf love? Reading
Coriolanus” in Representations 3 (summer 1983); Wofford, S. “The Body
Unseamed” (Introduction to Shakespeare’s Late Tragedies.)
Dec 10
Euripides, Trojan Women; Ellen McLaughlin, Iphigenia and Other Daughters
(1995); Racine, Andromaque
Secondary reading: Barthes, R. On Racine, translation by R. Howard (New York:
1964) of Sur Racine (Paris: 1960), selections.