The course, designed for students in any of the liberal arts disciplines, will first treat Aeschylus's Agamemnon and then turn to Nietzsche's account of the origins of Greek tragedy in the first nine sections of The Birth of Tragedy. Second, we will turn to Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Aristotle's account of tragedy in his Poetics, which takes Oedipus the King as its model. Third, we will turn to Sophocles' Antigony and Hegel's interpretation of it in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Finally, we will consider Euripides' Medea and then return to the Birth of Tragedy for Nietzsche's critical account of Euripides' dramas. Our task will be to learn what the uses of tragedy have been for philosophy, but also to see what understandings of human experience in tragic poetry are overridden and lost in philosophical interpretations of it. A principal theme of the course is language "poetic, rhetorical and philosophical". Accordingly, the course will applicable to, and count for the Philosophy and Communications track.
