Join Daniel Mendelsohn for a four-session webinar on Sophocles.
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.
