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| 0680-3113-01 | Tragedy & the Tragic: Literature Philosophy | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
This course will explore the transformations of one amongst the ancient literary genres in Western culture. Distinguishing between "Tragedy" and "The Tragic", French philosopher Henri Gouhier wrote: "Tragedy belongs to literature and to theatre, the tragic belongs to life." With this in mind, alongside comprehensive study of select tragic works and theories, the course will discuss problems such as: how the concept of the tragic was created to describe both collective and individual events, experiences and feelings? What are the ethical and political questions that are bound with the aesthetics of the genre? What sort of understanding of the interaction between literature and life engenders the relation between the philosophical problem of the Tragic, and the literary genre of Tragedy? We'll be reading works by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, Racine, Shakespeare, Beckett and others; we shall also watch some films and other related visual representations. Discussion will be complemented by detailed reading of philosophical and theoretical texts concerning tragedy and the tragic, by authors such as: Plato and Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. The course is intended for students in their 2nd and 3rd year of study who have completed introductory courses in literary theory and/or critical theory