The most technically innovative and iconoclastic of the three great tragedians, Euripides, considered by Aristotle to be the “most tragic” of them, was famous above all for his penchant for depicting heroines in extremis—so much so that the comic playwright, Aristophanes, wrote a lampoon of the tragedian’s work in which the women of Athens, fed up with being depicted as infanticidal, adulterous, homicidal, and incestuous, plot to assassinate the playwright. In the first three of our plays—Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Medea—we will focus on the representation of femininity in Euripides’ work, focusing on the female characters’ attempts to break out of the social roles that imprison them; while Bacchae, the playwright’s final tragedy, explores gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity in an astonishingly sophisticated and modern way.

Four one-hour sessions: May 7, 14, 21, and 28. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Euripides appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The tragedies of Sophocles place heroes characterized by remarkable determination and fixed ideas in situations designed to test the limits of both their convictions and their agency. Ajax, one of the greatest heroes of the Trojan War, must decide whether he can go one living with a humiliation visited upon him by the goddess Athena; Antigone, committed by her conscience to fulfill religious obligations to her dead kin, finds herself pitted against ruthless political power wielded by her uncle, the king. Philoctetes, about a wounded warrior abandoned in the wilds by the Greeks on their way to Troy, explores the tensions between nature and culture, civilization and savagery. And Oedipus, considered by Aristotle to be the model tragedy, brings tragic irony to unparalleled heights as it explores the awful fate of its protagonist, who keeps running into the destiny he seeks to flee.

Four one-hour sessions: April 9, 16, 23, and 30. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Sophocles appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In his remarkable preface to The Portrait of A Lady, Henry James described the problem posed by the novel as that of “organising an ado about Isabel Archer,” “the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl.” James’s solution was to write arguably the greatest Anglophone novel about the development of consciousness—a novel that insists on perceiving, thinking, and understanding as events, and exciting ones at that. Our discussion of The Portrait of A Lady, which will touch on issues of social and psychological realism, the American and international scenes, illicit affairs and unhappy marriages, will mark the seminar’s shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Four one-hour sessions: March 3, 10, 17, and 24. All sessions will start at 5pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Merve Emre

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, where she also hosts the podcast “The Critic and Her Publics.”

About This Series

In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James recalled the challenge presented to him by the novel’s main character, Isabel Archer. “By what process of logical accretion was this slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?” he wondered. “Well, what will she do?” This seminar takes James’s question—“What will she do?”—as crucial to the novel, a genre of fiction that has been particularly interested in how young women determine what to do with their lives. Reading across six novels—Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Elif Batuman’s Either / Or—we will trace the history of the novel through its evolving representations of sex, desire, race, class, and a distinctly female consciousness.

The post What Will She Do?: Merve Emre on Henry James’s <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em> appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The plays of Aeschylus, written in verse of astonishing complexity and density, searingly explore role of fate—as expressed in family curses and divine decrees—in human affairs, while investigating the limits and nature of mortal power. Persians, the only surviving tragedy on a historical (as opposed to mythological theme), imagines, with sometimes surprising sympathy, the aftermath in Persian of the arrogant emperor Xerxes’ defeat by the Greeks at Salamis. The Oresteia, the only surviving trilogy from the tragic canon, investigates the nature of vengeance, guilt, and justice as it traces the ramifications of the murder of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek expedition against Troy, by his wife Clytemnestra—a slaying that is itself revenge for a series of earlier crimes.

Four one-hour sessions: March 5, 12, 19, and 26. All sessions will start at 7pm EST/EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Aeschylus appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Homer’s epic about the consequences of a single incident in the final year of the Trojan War magnificently established the terms for the “idea of the tragic” and its accoutrements: the tragic hero, tragic irony, the tragic “flaw.” Confronted with a devastating insult to his honor, the Greek’s greatest warrior, Achilles, withdraws from the fighting as he struggles with the meaning of the choices he has made—not least, the choice to die young in return for everlasting glory. But his withdrawal sets in motion a sequence of events that will result in a loss far greater than the one that spurred his original crisis, precipitating the hero’s climactic confrontation with mortality.

Six one-hour sessions: January 15, 22, 29; February 5, 12, and 19. All sessions will start at 7pm EST. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on the <em>Iliad</em> appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The conversation will last approximately 90 minutes, including a question-and-answer period.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies Emeritus at Oxford and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. A longtime contributor to the New York Review, he is the author of 11 books of contemporary history, and most recently, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, which recently won the Lionel Gelber Prize.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale, where he also serves as faculty adviser to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Among his many books are: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), On Tyranny (2017), and, most recently, On Freedom, which was published in September.

Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Kyiv-based Ukrainian journalist and author. She is the founder and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab (PIJL) which promotes constructive discussion around complex social issues, and a co-founder of The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies, which documents war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russia. She is the author of The Lost Island: Tales From The Occupied Crimea (2020) and The Maidan Tahrir (2015), and co-author of The Scariest Days of My Life: The Dispatches of the Reckoning Project (2023). 

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing aspects of the 2024 presidential election. In each conversation, held on Zoom, our contributors discuss the critical issues of our time. Each conversation will last approximately ninety minutes and include a Q&A session.

The post ‘For Our Freedom and Yours’: Ukraine, Europe, and the US Election appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The conversation will last approximately 90 minutes, including a question-and-answer period.

Mark Danner is the author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair at the University of California at Berkeley and is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard.

Pamela Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School and Codirector of the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. She is the author of A Constitution for All Times and a coauthor of The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process and Keeping Faith with the Constitution.

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued this year.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing aspects of the 2024 US Presidential election. The conversations, to be held via video on Zoom, will feature our most insightful contributors discussing the critical issues of our time.

The conversations will each last approximately ninety minutes and include a Q&A session.

The post What If He Wins? A Conversation About Trump and the Law appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The conversation will last approximately 90 minutes, including a question-and-answer period.

Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, Blue Ruin, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. .

Jacqueline Rose is internationally known for her writing on feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and the politics and ideology of Israel-Palestine. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, States of Fantasy, The Question of Zion, and most recently Women in Dark Times. She is the co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices, and a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Literary Society.

Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School and University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. She is a pioneer of the law and literature movement and a scholar of feminism and race in American jurisprudence. For two decades, she wrote the “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” column for The Nation Magazine. She is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, the 1997 Reith Lecturer for the BBC, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights, The Rooster’s Egg, Seeing a ColorBlind Future, Open House, Giving a Damn, and, most recently, The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies and The Spirit of the Law.

The post Mirror Issues: How the President Reflects the State of the Nation appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The conversation will last approximately 90 minutes, including a question-and-answer period.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a member of the Evergreen Advisory Board. As the policy director for New Consensus, Rhiana was one of the intellectual architects of the Green New Deal. She is the author of the critically acclaimed essay “The Green New Deal for All of Us” and has written for The New York Times. She is currently at work on a book about the climate crisis.

Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, Outside, and Grist. His latest book is The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon (2022).

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing aspects of the 2024 US Presidential election. The conversations, to be held via video on Zoom, will feature our most insightful contributors discussing the critical issues of our time.

The conversations will each last approximately ninety minutes and include a Q&A session.

The post The Climate Election: Fighting for a Greener Future appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The conversation will last approximately 90 minutes, including a question-and-answer period.

Ben Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He is the author of the New York Timesbestsellers After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made and The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. He is currently co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor to MSNBC, and a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama. From 2009–2017, Ben served as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Adviser to president Obama.

Suzy Hansen is a journalist, author, and editor. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan award. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York.

Pankaj Mishra is an essayist and novelist, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, and the author of two books of history: From the Ruins of Empire and Age of Anger: A History of the Present. His new book, The World After Gaza, will be published in February next year.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing aspects of the 2024 US Presidential election. The conversations, to be held via video on Zoom, will feature our most insightful contributors discussing the critical issues of our time.

The conversations will each last approximately ninety minutes and include a Q&A session.

The post Gaza, Israel, and the American Left: October 7 One Year Later appeared first on The New York Review of Books.