TTC - Greek Tragedy - Elizabeth Vandiver torrent

Category: Lecture
Language: English
Keywords: Elizabeth Vandiver Greece History Tragedy ttc
Written by Elizabeth Vandiver
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Professor Elizabeth Vandiver explores fully 25 of the 32 surviving tragedies that the great Athenian playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have left to us.

Now two-and-a-half millennia old, ancient dramas such as Eumenides, Oedipus the King, and Trojan Women retain a compelling, almost incantatory power.

Professor Vandiver observes early in the course:

“It is a notable paradox that Greek tragedy, a dramatic form that flourished for less than a full century, a dramatic form that began in a particular religious festival of a particular god some 2,500 years ago, remains vibrant, alive, and productive today.

“It seems that there is something about tragedy that lifts it out of its particular circumstances and beyond its particular gods, social issues, and political concerns to give a kind of universality that is, in the last analysis, very surprising.”

These plays have attracted focus and reflection from Aristotle, Freud, Nietzsche, and others who look deeply into the human condition. The great tragedies shed light on the extraordinary time, place, and people that produced them.

And they may help us—as perhaps they helped their original audiences—to grasp a fuller sense of both the terror and wonder that life presents.

24 Lectures
30 minutes / lecture

1 Tragedy Defined
2 Democracy, Culture, and Tragedy
3 Roots of a Genre
4 Production and Stagecraft
5 Aeschylus—Creator of an Art Form
6 The Oresteia—Mythic Background
7 The Oresteia—Agamemnon
8 The Oresteia—Libation Bearers and Eumenides
9 A Master of Spectacle
10 The Three Electras
11 The Sophoclean Hero
12 Antigone and Creon
13 Oedipus the King, I
14 Oedipus the King, II
15 Two Tragedians, One Hero
16 Greek Husband, Foreign Wife
17 Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Aphrodite’s Wrath
18 Euripides on War and Women
19 Euripides the Anti-Tragedian
20 The Last Plays of Euripides
21 Euripides and the Gods
22 The Last Plays of Sophocles
23 Other Tragedians and a Comedian
24 The Tragic Legacy